Late February closes the month with a tightly packed run of openings across London, where drawing meets sculpture, sound becomes architecture, ornament carries memory, and street-born visual languages move into the gallery space. From intimate solo presentations to ambitious group shows, these exhibitions trace how artists use mark, material, and form to hold personal histories and collective experience.
Thursday 26th February
Hazlitt-Holland Hibbert 6PM – 8PM
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert present an exhibition of drawings by Rachel Whiteread alongside a small selection of related sculptures, marking a rare departure from the artist’s longstanding practice of keeping these two mediums separate. For decades, a label on the back of the artist’s framed drawings has stated: ‘It is Rachel Whiteread’s express wish that none of her drawings should be exhibited alongside her sculptures’ – a directive that underscores the deeply personal nature of her works on paper, most of which reside in her studio archive.
Curated in close collaboration with Whiteread, this exhibition therefore represents a significant moment in understanding her practice and reveals the fluid relationship between mediums that has always existed in her work, even as she has maintained their physical and conceptual separation. There is no hierarchy between the mediums; rather, as Allegra Pesenti observes, ‘the drawings are as sculptural as the sculptures are graphic
Cell Project Space 6PM -9PM
Artist and musician, LA Timpa presents his first UK solo exhibition and a new body of work that extends his compositional practice into spatial form. Rooted in memory, the installation considers how sound leaves its trace on physical matter, proposing sculpture as a resonant architecture through which histories are held, carried, and given agency.
For this exhibition, Timpa summons unseen presences, reframing listening as an embodied, durational encounter. Drawing from personal narratives shaped by precarity, his work opens onto wider reflections on exile and return. Listening becomes a way of navigating the porous terrain between an internal world and the material, social, and political structure that surrounds it. @l.a.timpa @cell_project_space
Wilder Gallery 6.30PM-8.30PM
Wilder Gallery present Fire | Orchid, a solo exhibition by Hannah Lim, marking the artist’s second presentation with the gallery. Bringing together new paintings and Lim’s distinctive Snuff Bottle series, the exhibition expands upon her ongoing exploration of cultural inheritance, ornament, and the symbolic language of objects.
The works in Fire | Orchid draw particular inspiration from Lim’s recent journey to Singapore and Malaysia, where she reconnected with extended family and revisited the visual environments that continue to shape her practice. Working from her mixed Singaporean and British heritage, Lim reflects on how architectural detail, decorative traditions, and material culture become carriers of memory — quietly embedding themselves within contemporary forms. @wilder.gallery @hannahlim
Woodbury House 6PM -9PM
Woodbury House brings a piece of Los Angeles’ visual DNA to Mayfair with Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage, a landmark group exhibition uniting four artists whose work has helped shape the city’s cultural identity from the street up. Featuring Chaz Bojórquez, DEFER, Estevan Oriol and RETNA, the show marks the first time these figures have exhibited together — a rare alignment that traces how a local visual language became global.
The exhibition approaches Los Angeles not as a style to export but as a living system of culture — forged through community, discipline and continuity across decades.
Friday 27th February
OHSH 5PM – 9PM
OHSH present RUNES, a group exhibition at Thames-Side Studios Gallery. Bringing together an intergenerational group of artists, RUNES explores the emergence of human mark-making through abstraction, tracing visual language as an unbroken thread linking contemporary practice with ancient traditions of symbol and inscription.
ARTISTS: Bijanka Bacic, Basil Beattie RA, Magda Blasinska, Alice Browne, Jo Dennis, Howard Dyke, Gus Farnes, Guy Haddon Grant, John Hoyland RA, Albert Irvin RA, Harry Kincade, Arthur Lanyon, Paul Moriarty, Pia Ortuño, Jonathan Michael Ray, Kes Richardson.
The exhibition places pioneering post-war abstractionists, including Basil Beattie RA and work from the estates of John Hoyland RA and Albert Irvin RA, alongside leading contemporary painters and sculptors whose practices span painting, installation, assemblage and material experimentation. Across the exhibition, artists will investigate gesture, geometry, ritual mark, surface and symbol as carriers of memory, perception and belief. Some will draw from archaeology, mythology and landscape; whilst others will work through colour, structure, and others still will build visual languages from found materials, repetition or intuitive drawing. @ohshprojects
Also, this week, some great museum exhibitions are opening:
Tracey Emin, A Second Life at Tate Modern 27th Feb 2026 – 31st Aug @tate
Rose Wylie, The Picture Comes First at The RA, 28th Feb – 19th April @royalacademyarts
Beatriz González at the Barbican Art Gallery Wed 25th Feb—Sun 10th May @barbicancentre
Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life at the Hayward Gallery, Tue 17th Feb – Sun 3rd May @hayward.gallery
Categories
Tags
- Albert Irvin RA
- Alice Browne
- Art Exhibitions London
- Arthur Lanyon
- Basil Beattie RA
- Bijanka Bacic
- Cell Project Space
- Gus Farnes
- Guy Haddon Grant
- Hannah Lim
- Harry Kincade
- Hazlitt Holland Hibbert
- Howard Dyke
- JO DENNIS
- John Hoyland RA
- jonathan michael ray
- Kes Richardson
- LA Timpa
- Magda Blasinska
- ohsh projects
- Paul Moriarty
- Pia Ortuño
- Rachel Whiteread
- Wilder Gallery
- Woodbury House
