Five art openings to kick off 2026, split neatly across two nights.
Thursday leans into the collective, with two group exhibitions showcasing work by more than thirty artists across contrasting spaces. Friday shifts the focus to the individual, with three solo shows offering distinct voices, materials and worlds.
Thursday 8th January 2026
OHSH Projects 5PM – 9PM
PELT is a group exhibition due to be presented at the Old Waiting Room, a historic space located above Peckham Rye Station, originally constructed during the Victorian era. The site’s layered history provides a resonant context for an exhibition concerned with the surface as a site of memory, transformation and mortality.
The exhibition will examine the dual role of skin as both a symbolic and material threshold, a subject long embedded in art history and increasingly central to contemporary discourse surrounding the body. Through painting, sculpture and installation, the participating artists address the visual and cultural tension between the representation of aging flesh and the pursuit of idealised perfection.
ARTISTS: Scarlett Budden, Poppy Cauchi, David Cooper, Jamie John Davies, Cristiano Di Martino, Kate Dunn, Annie Edwards, Laurence Edwards, Ruben Eikebo, Hester Finch, Aaron Jupin, Hynek Martinec, Ana Milenkovic, John Moran, Boo Saville, John Stark, Dominic Watson, Roger Weiss, Mathew Weir. @ohshprojects
Great Pulteney Street Gallery 6PM -8PM
Great Pulteney Street Gallery rings in 2026 with a group exhibition that explores the links between marginalised materials and cultural hierarchies. For Connecting Threads, Paul Carey-Kent and Christina Niederberger selected eleven artists whose works broaden the scope of textile art.
Exhibiting artists: Berend Strik, Caroline Achaintre, Christina Niederberger, Debbie Lawson, Hannah Knox, John Walter, Julie Cockburn, Kate Terry, Michael Raedecker, Sam Owen Hull and Tamar Mason. @gpsgallerysoho Curated by @paulcareykent & @christinaniederberger
Friday 9th January 2026
Palmer Gallery 6PM-8PM
Spooky Action At a Distance, is a solo exhibition of new work by London-based artist Max Boyla (b.1991, Edinburgh). Bringing together recent paintings on satin, sculptural works, video, and sound, the exhibition examines how images form, how materials behave, and how both physical and conceptual frameworks shape perception. @actually_maxboyla – @palmer.gallery
Chilli 6PM-8PM
Chilli presents Willa Cosinuke’s first London solo exhibition. Each of the paintings in Split Studies begins from a condition of assembly. Rather than a singular, pristine surface, irregular, interlocking panels come together like fragments searching for coherence. This act of construction forms the first scaffold – a puzzling framework that holds what will later shimmer, vibrate and push against it. Across these hybrid canvases, colour, line and mark collide with force. Radiant, reflective gestures build in dense clusters, pressing up against sharp geometric boundaries. There is a sense of containment here, as painterly energy is boxed within grids that slide into place. Yet these structures don’t just restrain, they also choreograph, briefly guiding movement before letting it slip, crack or shift. Willa Cosinuke @bbforeveralways – @chilli_gallery
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery 6PM-8PM
Norwegian artist Sverre Malling (b. 1977) is the maker of possible worlds. Or rather, in his work we encounter possible pasts, presents and futures. History is malleable, and the canons of Western art are revealed as constructions to be renegotiated and reassessed. What is revealed in the purity and simplicity of At The Mistress’ Request, his large presentation of charcoal drawings presented at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, is a distinct, almost haunting image-world. @sverre_malling –@kristinhjellegjerdegallery
