As London Gallery Weekend approaches, Frieze’s year-round gallery space at No.9 Cork Street will bring two leading Indian galleries to the centre of Mayfair. Running from 5th–28th June, exhibitions by Project 88 and Vadehra Art Gallery continue a programme that has increasingly amplified South Asian voices and perspectives in recent seasons.
The presentations arrive as distinct but complementary propositions: one rooted in contemporary material and ecological thinking, the other tracing the legacy of one of India’s most influential modernist painters.
Project 88 makes its No.9 Cork Street debut with Treeish, a thematic group exhibition curated by Prajna Desai. Bringing together works by Claire Baker, Mahesh Baliga, Neha Choksi, Goutam Ghosh, Trupti Patel and Tejal Shah, the exhibition borrows its poetic framework from the writings of British tree scientist Harriet Rix and explores the quiet force and agency of trees.
Spanning sculpture, painting, video and material practices, Treeish approaches the tree as more than subject matter — as animate, ancestral and deeply entangled with ideas of memory and care. Layered paintings on aluminium, finger paintings on glass, ceramic forms and works emerging through acts of printing and material transformation all converge around a recurring question: are trees independent presences, or forms continually reshaped through human stewardship and preservation? The exhibition also extends Never Was a Shade, currently on view at Project 88 in Mumbai, creating a conversation between two cities and two exhibition spaces.
Returning to No.9 Cork Street, Vadehra Art Gallery presents A Singular Modernist, dedicated to the work of the late A. Ramachandran (1935–2023). Across a career spanning five decades, Ramachandran developed a rich visual language across painting, mural-making, sculpture and drawing, informed by his engagement with the Bhil community of Udaipur and the wider histories of tribal, folk and classical Indian art traditions.
The exhibition brings together works from his 1980s Puppet Theatre series alongside later paintings, drawings and sculpture, including the luminous lotus pond imagery that became one of the defining motifs of his mature practice. Together, the works offer a concentrated view of an artist whose expansive approach continuously moved between mythology, landscape and lived experience.
As Selvi May Akyildiz, Director of No.9 Cork Street, notes: “London has always been a crossroads for global perspectives,” making these exhibitions a fitting addition to one of the city’s key cultural weekends.
Project 88 and Vadehra Art Gallery, 5th–28th June, 2026, No.9 Cork Street
