Canopy Collections, 3 Bloomsbury Place, London WC1A 2QA
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Canopy Collections, founded five years ago by Louise Chignac and Cécile Ganansia, started online and operated a flexible model through displays in domestic spaces, collaborations with other galleries and nomadic exhibitions across London, Paris and Milan: I recall, for example, the first UK solo show of the excellent Belgian painter Charlotte Beaudry at the fleeting art hub of Cromwell Place in 2023. Other partners included The Royal Society of Sculptors, Thomas Dane Gallery, Bowman Sculpture, Van Gogh House and Gertrude. Last September, though, Canopy Collections opened a permanent space near the British Museum, enabling it to host a regular programme of exhibitions in a more orthodox manner.
Canopy works regularly with 23 artists, and the programme to date in Bloomsbury has featured seven of them: Mexican artist duo Celeste (María Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alemán); Thomas Cameron (nicely focused on images of people waiting); William Cobbing (in conjunction with his public commission for Selfridges London, worth catching until October); Richard J Butler’s near-abstract landscapes; Lara Davies’ poignant series tracking her great aunt in a trip the length of Britain; Ian Whittlesea’s selection of anonymous Rosicrucian drawings; and now Emerson Pullman’s portraits. Pullman effects what I’m tempted to call ‘reverse pareidolia’ – finding abstraction in the figurative, rather than the figurative in abstraction, the effect being – in the gallery’s words – that he paints ‘the idea of the self in motion, caught between presence and absence, form and dissolution. Faces emerge and recede, bodies take shape only to blur at the edges, as if memory and reality are negotiating space on the canvas.’
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
