Mid-February delivers a busy cluster of things to step out for — proper exhibition openings alongside a book launch, a talk, and a live programme that spills beyond the gallery format. From Conceptual art history and industrial photography to small-scale painting and experimental sound, it’s a week that shows London at its most varied (and most alive after dark).
Wednesday 18th February
Raven Row 6.30PM–8.30PM
Raven Row present Conceptual Art and Christine Kozlov. By the time she left art school in New York in 1967, Christine Kozlov (1945–2005) was part of a radical new direction in art practice that became known as Conceptual Art. This exhibition reveals the scope of Kozlov’s activity, with a focus on her contributions to Conceptual Art from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, shown with work by a network of her peers.
Conceptual Art emerged as a theoretical and left political position that rejected the high modernism, Minimalism and Pop Art that dominated the discourse of the mid-to-late 1960s. Valuing the production of ideas over objects, foregrounded by language, works of Conceptual Art were often made using readily available materials such as office supplies and photocopies, and devices to hand such as typewriters and sound recorders. Works were readymades, or took the form of documentation or information. Many conceptual artists tilted toward the politics of daily life and antiauthoritarian protest. From 1968 through to the mid-1970s, the positions and camps of global Conceptual Art were represented predominantly in the form of group exhibitions, some of which Kozlov coorganised. Nearly all of the works Kozlov contributed to these exhibitions will be on view here.
A broader context for this way of working and Kozlov’s thinking is raised in the exhibition through the relationships between her artworks and those of her friends and interlocutors. These include stanley brouwn, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper and Lawrence Weiner. Collective and group work absorbed Kozlov from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s. This exhibition reflects her collaborations with The Red Krayola, as well as Art & Language, Joan Jonas and Robert Rauschenberg. Kozlov moved to the UK in 1977. The last of her works in this exhibition was made here, in response to the first Gulf War.
Conceptual Art and Christine Kozlov is curated by Rhea Anastas in cooperation with the Christine Kozlov Estate.
Soup 6PM-9PM
Soup present their 18th exhibition, ‘Common Place’, a two-person exhibition of works by Matthew Clifton and Faith Hughes.
Matthew Clifton (b. 1992) is a British artist based in Leeds. He graduated with a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts in 2015. Soup previously presented work by Clifton in our ‘All The Small Things’ group exhibition in November 2023. Clifton’s drawing and painting practice merges historical motifs with contemporary vignettes to capture everyday suburban settings. His small scale works, instilled with the spirit of casual phone camera snapshots, serves as if stills from a storyboard in progress. Coarse landscape studies, sentimental street scenes and dense abstracted details are all depicted with the formality and accuracy of a distant memory.
Faith Hughes (b.1998) is a British-American artist based in Los Angeles. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2020. With a practice spanning painting and sculpted craft, Hughes works from extensively researched found imagery as a means to distill her experience of living and remembering. With milk glass, ceramic tile, wood block or tin foil as her unique choice of painterly ground, she shifts through vintage film footage, forgotten home movies and archival instructional videos to tease out an image to immortalise as object, regenerating meaning through making.
Thursday 19th February
Sprüth Magers, London 6PM – 8PM
Sprüth Magers, London present a solo exhibition that includes several groupings of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s most recognisable archetypal forms: gas tanks, water towers, winding towers and framework houses. Icons of German postwar photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher meticulously documented industrial architecture across Europe and North America, challenging the distinction between documentary and fine art photography. Their photography simultaneously distils each construction into a taxonomy of visually and functionally homogeneous structures, whilst emphasising the particular and eccentric character of each.
Lisson Gallery 6.30PM -8PM
Not an art opening thats happening on Tuesday 17th but a Talk & Book Launch.
Join acclaimed author Max Porter for a conversation on his new novella, Rodney Graham: Trees, and a reading accompanied by musician Christof Van Der Ven. This event is hosted on the occassion of the exhibition Rodney Graham: Who doesn’t love a tree? at Lisson Gallery.
He’s a sentimental silviculturalist. He’s a traditionalist. He’s a significant shade-bearing tree but he’s generous to younger artists. He’s a soft touch. He’s a wit, but he’s not trying to be funny. He’s sick, but he doesn’t know it yet. He dreams of being twenty-seven metres tall and hung from the ceiling, but he’s rooted. He’s well aware of what keeps him upside-down at night, ‘before the brain gets it right’, he’s branching out but misses the band, misses using his hands, he’s reliably uncertain, occasionally diffident, he flinches from being called obstreperous, but leans into sneaky, sessile, generous, emblematic.
– Max Porter, Trees
Places are limited so RSVP via Eventbrite
Chisenhale 7PM
Not an art opening (again) but… Chisenhale Gallery presents a three-part live programme curated by writer, researcher, and DJ Nihal El Aasar, accompanying Arash Nassiri’s exhibition A Bug’s Life. Across sound, conversation, and performance, the series explores listening as a shared practice.
This opening event is a live performance by El Aasar, drawing from her archive of music from across Southwest Asia and North Africa. Working entirely in digital format, the set moves between well-known label releases and rare, out of circulation tracks. By placing these recordings side by side, El Aasar explores how sound travels, and how systems of distribution, access, and circulation shape what and how we hear.
You can BooK HERE
*yep we know technically 3 art openings, a book launch/talk, and a live program
