London may have had fewer art fairs in June, but the summer edition of London Art Week (LAW) returns (until July 7) with 51 participating galleries, both in-person and online. And that’s all the more important this year for many non-contemporary galleries who find themselves with a real dearth of summer fairs to attend, with the disappearance of Masterpiece London and Olympia (although the new Treasure House Fair on the old Masterpiece site at the Royal Hospital Chelsea at the end of June offered an outing to some).
While the new London Gallery Weekend (LGW, in June) focuses on contemporary art galleries, LAW offers a range of specialties from antiquity to the 21st century, but with a definite penchant for historical art – the participants exhibit paintings and sculptures alongside decorative arts and, for the first time, rare books, maps and manuscripts.
Exhibitions take place in galleries around St. James’s, Mayfair, Pimlico, Kensington and Chelsea, as well as Cromwell Place in South Kensington, and online (after the pandemic, attendees can now choose to be online only ). Auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams are also joining their Old Masters sales this week.
Unlike LGW, LAW isn’t about showing off the newest names to know in contemporary art, but one of its strengths is serving up the unexpected, whether that’s a rediscovered old master or of small-scale exhibitions that often focus on lesser-known artists from years or centuries. past, artists we might never have met otherwise.
Here are six shows to see before they close on Friday.
Ben & Slinky by Winifred Nicholson
Courtesy of Patrick and Cordelia Bourne
Patrick Bourne & Co, 6 St James’s Place, London, SW1A 1NP
Patrick and Cordelia Bourne, husband and wife, are exhibiting a small group of six works, from a private collection, by British painter Winifred Nicholson, who lived between Cumberland, London and Paris. Two of the works are, according to the gallery, among the artist’s most important and have never been commercialized before—Ben and Slinky (1927), depicting Winifred’s husband, artist Ben Nicholson, and his dog (so called for his habit of sneaking up to the chicken coop), and Sequence of rectangles (circa 1934).
The bust of Stephen Tomlin Julia Tomlin (born Strachey) from 1928
Courtesy of Philip Mold
Philip Mold & Co, 18-19 Pall Mall, London, SW1Y 5LU
“The devastation of all hearts”. This is how Virginia Woolf describes sculptor Stephen Tomlin, a now unrecognized member of the Bloomsbury Group, who died aged just 35. He is the subject of Philip Mould’s LAW exhibition, Bloomsbury stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin (June 5 to August 11). As the title of the exhibition does not so subtly suggest, Tomlin had many affairs, with men and women, including Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington, writer David Garnett, photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer and the uncle of Tomlin’s own wife, Lytton Strachey. The show will include a bust of Strachey, alongside those of Grant and Woolf (both on loan from the Charleston Trust).
Alejandro Mario Yllanes Balsero of Titicaca (1935)
Courtesy of Ben Elwes Fine Art
Ben Elwes Fine Art, 45 Maddox Street, London, W1S 2PE
An air of mystery surrounds the late Alejandro Mario Yllanes, a self-taught Bolivian painter and political activist who disappeared from public records in 1946 after winning, but not claiming, a coveted Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Although he exhibited in the Americas during his lifetime, his work has not been exhibited publicly for nearly 30 years. He now receives his very first exhibition in Europe, at Ben Elwes Fine Art, which organizes a personal exhibition of the artist during London Art Week. “We have been asked to sell the entire surviving body of work – monumental paintings and works on paper – by this remarkable modern Bolivian artist,” says gallery co-founder Rachel Elwes. The work for sale belongs to a European couple who acquired it in the 1990s. “With his indigenous heritage, Yllanes addressed the subjugation, struggle and liberation of the Aymara people at a time of upheaval in history Bolivian,” says Elwes. Such themes are evident in Yllanes’ oil painting of a raft worker crossing Lake Titicaca, a scene he depicted in a 1930s mural that was later destroyed. Yllanes recreated the work on a similar monumental scale, placing various aspects of indigenous Bolivian culture in “the place of honor”, says Elwes.
One of Sarah Stone’s ornithological watercolors, on display at Finch and Co
Courtesy of Finch and Co
Finch & Co, Cromwell Place, 4 Cromwell Place, London, SW7 2JE
Born the daughter of a fan painter, self-taught artist Sarah Stone (1760-1844) began painting at an early age and devoted herself to making intricate watercolors of birds, mammals, fish, of insects, shells, minerals and ethnological objects at a time when many species were first discovered and brought back to England. While still very young, Stone was commissioned by Ashton Lever, owner of the Leverian Museum in London, to paint items from his ethnography and natural history collection, just in time as his entire collection was sold out. auctioned in 1806. Today Craig Finch will exhibit a group of 23 18th-century ornithological watercolors by Stone, from a private collection, at Cromwell Place. The decision to participate in LAW after the cancellation of the Masterpiece London show, Finch said, was an “obvious decision, joining a serious and well-established platform, with a strong focus on the world of museums and collecting areas. top of the line”.
A detail of Giambologna To walk March
Courtesy of Stuart Lochhead Sculpture
Sculpture by Stuart Lochhead, 1st Floor, 35 Bury Street, St. James’s, SW1Y 6AU
Lochhead’s exhibition The Alchemist’s Laboratory: Giambologna’s Forge in Florence brings together five late 16th-century bronzes by Giambologna, including versions of the Walk on Mars And lion attacking a horse. The bronzes have been accumulated for 20 years by an American collector, and they will be offered for sale as a group. “Although it did not seek to create the philosopher’s stone, Giambologna’s forge changed the state of metals, blending contemporary religious sentiment and pagan mythology, and infusing artistic life into inert matter,” explains Lochhead in a statement. “Sculptors from all over Europe took part in this process of transformation, learning from his skills, continuing to mold his models for more than two centuries and thus testifying to the longevity of his creative force.”
An ancient Egyptian relief of an owl, circa 300 BC.
Courtesy of Rupert Wace
Rupert Bathurst and Rupert Wace, Shapero Rare Books, 106 New Bond St, London W1S 1DN
“The cliché of the juxtaposition of old and contemporary art is nothing new,” says antiques dealer Rupert Wace. “Many artists of the past collected antiquities and were influenced and inspired by them and marveled at the skill and purity of aesthetics of the ancients.” Wace has collaborated with artist Rupert Bathurst for a joint LAW exhibition titled Fragments, which positions antiquities from “throughout the classical world, Egypt and the Near East, plus one or two ‘fragments’ from the natural world” to alongside Bathurst’s watercolor abstractions (which take on “a lent flavor of ambiguous hieroglyphics”, alongside antiquities, Bathurst says). At the heart of the show, says Wace, “the impermanence and fragility of human existence”, and one of his favorite objects in the show is this fragment of an Egyptian relief of an owl, “an ideal example of how a fragment can be a perfect and complete object of beauty.The relief, which dates from around 300 BC, was previously in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Diniacopoulos, archaeologists and merchants of art in the Middle East, Europe and Canada, and are said to have purchased the owl between 1910 and 1932. It is priced at £24,000.
