The hottest emerging shows to see during London Gallery Weekend

London may be battered by the effects of Brexit, Boris and rental landlords, but its emerging art scene remains resilient (anxieties of mass migration to Margate remain, for now, just that). To shine a light on the efforts of gallery owners and creatives who keep the city at the forefront of technology, we’ve selected four of the best exhibitions taking place during London Gallery Weekend that feature early-career artists. With a wide age range and working in a variety of mediums and styles, the one common factor between these artists is that none have yet had a major institutional solo exhibition.

Laila Majid + Louis Blue Newby: the pretty girls on top
Xxijra Hii at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ, June 2-July 1

The eerie, often erotic images found in Laila Majid + Louis Blue Newby’s woodblock collages come from an online archive shared by the artist duo. The couple print these images and layer them with text and line art on greased paper, before encasing them in clear resin casts of fur and leather. “We find these images on Reddit message boards, in wildlife encyclopedias, in kinky zines sold on eBay at house sales. So many movie theaters in Soho are also getting rid of their erotic magazine archives,” says Newby. . “We’re drawn to non-normative images, ones that don’t do what they’re supposed to do,” adds Majid.

Both artists share an interest in fetish and leather subcultures, and therefore consider how images shared between underground scenes help build communities and networks – in other words, they argue that people don’t just not to form and circulate images, but are also formed and disseminated by them. . Two floor sculptures of jesmonite, the color of pale, blushing skin, resemble sex pillows with nipples attached to their sides, underscoring the artists’ mutual interest in eroticism.

This exhibition at the boutique, a compact space run by Sadie Coles HQ, next to her huge Soho headquarters, marks Majid and Newby’s first joint show since securing commercial representation for their collaborative practice with Deptford Gallery. Xxijra Hii, who co-presents the exhibition. This unusual signature is an example of the ever-changing ways in which artists interact with dealers and shape their careers. Majid and Newby, who graduated together from Chelsea College of Art in 2019, each say they are “in no rush” to find solo performance.

Qualeasha wood: TL; DR,
Pippy Houldsworth, 6 Heddon St W1B 4BT, until June 4

Brooklyn-based Qualeasha Wood’s tapestries merge IRL with URL: iOS emojis and Microsoft Windows pop-ups are covered in self-portraits, in a cluttered, assembly-like style, so as to look like a Myspace profile. All of this is rendered in the resolutely analog and traditional technique of jacquard weaving.

Wood uses these works to articulate her experience as a black woman navigating the modern digital realm, where the hyper-consumption of black culture circulates alongside the traumatic pornography of modern lynchings. As she puts it: “Practicing online safety as a black woman refers to the practice of protecting your time, energy, resources, intellect and image – the extension of your physical body – against racism, sexism, abuse, manipulation or theft.”

By creating tapestries bearing his digital avatar, Wood reworks the web in his own language and places it under his ownership. To do this, she says, is to turn “the gaze to the voyeur” and create a space that “actively rejects the white gaze/supremacy” – a space in which “whiteness becomes an ‘other'”.

Amanda Moström: ‘itsanosofadog * It’s a dog’s ass,
Rose Easton, 223 Cambridge Heath Rd E2 0EL, until June 10

For her first exhibition at Rose Easton Gallery, Amanda Moström presents a group of alpaca wool wall works that are both conceptually and materially inspired by her sister’s farm in the Swedish countryside. The artist has spent much of the pandemic on this farm with her family, living in “a small matriarchal commune with gentle animals,” she says. Moström shapes the wool to form keyholes through which painted still images of a Labrador tending to his puppies are seen, addressing themes of voyeurism, intimacy and non-human status. Another body of work on display features photographs taken by the artist’s grandmother and ties to Moström’s longstanding idiosyncratic attempts to connect family themes with erotic themes.

Moström defines this impulse less as an incestuous impulse, but rather as his desire to decouple eroticism from sex. “What interests me is seeing erotica more as a way of being pushed and pushed to do something, not necessarily about sex, but about energy,” she says. . “I think we can better understand the different forms of desire by doing this.” Moström attributes his vision to spending so much time with animals. “Life on the farm is normalizing a lot – sex, death, bodies. It’s honest. All of a sudden, all of these horrible parts of the human and non-human experience don’t make you feel so disgusted,” she says.

The artificial silk girl
Brunette Coleman, 42 Theobalds Road WC1X 8 NW, through July 1

This one’s a bonus: the brand new Brunette Coleman gallery is not officially part of the London Gallery Weekend programme, having only opened yesterday. Its inaugural exhibition – a group show of nine emerging female artists – is titled after a best-selling Weimar Republic-era novel that was later banned under the Nazi regime; the gallery’s name also comes from a pseudonym used by poet Philip Larkin. Such associations correspond to the gallery’s location in Bloomsbury, the historic heart of London’s literary scene (although a sort of dead zone for commercial galleries, at least for now). Among the works on display is Parisian artist Clémence de la Tour du Pin’s parchment wall sculpture, on which she painted an umbrella, and which gives off an intense smell of decay.

“We want the space to look a bit like New York in London,” says Ted Targett, who co-founded the gallery with his partner Anna Eaves. Both Targett and Eaves cut their teeth in the London gallery scene, working for Union Pacific and Huxley Parlor. Their ambition for their space is to combat a sense of ‘inside’ they feel in the commercial art world of their city, providing a platform for international artists to stage their first exhibition in the UK. This includes Dallas-based Michelle Rawlings, whose bizarre painting of a ballerina is included in the inaugural show. Targett says a degree of homogeneity within the London art scene can be attributed to the “over-professionalisation” of the city’s art schools, adding that “everyone has to sell out early”, which leads to “less open conversations about what art can be”.