Arcadia Missa, 35 Duke Street, London W1U 1LH
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Rózsa Farkas founded Arcadia Missa straight out of college in 2011, initially as a non-profit project space. Her background was in writing and curating, which continues to be reflected in the gallery’s adventurous publication programme, largely independent of the shows. The initial location was a railway arch in Peckham, some way from being an orthodox gallery. That means one could take the distinctive Latinate name – which might be translated as ‘holy mass in a pastoral utopia’ – as a critique of the transcendental pretensions of the ‘white cube’ space. Just so, the programme tends to emphasise the grittier realities of social change, gender politics and the impact of technology.
Arcadia Missa moved to a commercial model, representing artists from 2014, and switched physically into a smaller but more central space in Soho in 2018, and then to the current larger gallery near Bond Street station in 2021, with two floors available for exhibitions. The gallery is certainly in tune with Turner Prize trends: not only did Jesse Darling win in 2023, both last year’s winner, Nnena Kalu, and one of the other finalists, Rene Matic, are on the roster. You have until 1st May to catch earlier work by Kalu in the upper space, as well as Morag Keil at the street level she feeds into the gallery. That’s part of an entertaining take on modern communication, for which sculptural figures have screens as faces. None of which, I notice, is to mention four others I particularly like among the 18 artists currently represented: Phoebe Collings-James, Penny Goring, Reina Sugihara, and Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD.
