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Viewing Joanna Allen: Subconscious Playground at Bowman Sculpture

Joanna Allen is an emerging sculptor to know: the Dorset-based artist has been working steadily with her own take on Surrealism, with a contemporary perspective that feels fresh. Her latest body of work, on show until the end of the month at Bowman Sculpture, has been four years in the making and feels like a pivotal moment for the artist.

Allen’s series of sculptures for Subconscious Playground begin with psychomorphic drawings Allen makes, sometimes inspired by images that come to mind as she meditates – there is a special space in her studio, she has said, for that purpose. She then collaborates with an atelier in Italy to transform clay and plaster casts into marble and bronze.

As Allen’s title suggests, this solo exhibition is both playful and profound, an experimental and exploratory take on the inner workings of the mind and how they might manifest in the body – moving between figurative and abstract forms in a contemplative and intuitive way.

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Dates
01 May 2025 — 30 May 2025

Viewing Lou Zhenggang: Shizen at Almine Rech

There’s a buzz about the current Almine Rech show in London – and it’s easy to see why. The solo exhibition by Lou Zhenggang at the gallery is organised with and co-curated by art world giant Simon de Pury, and is the first time the famed Chinese artist has presented a solo exhibition at the gallery.

Zhenggang, 58, is an acclaimed international artist. She was already well known as a child for her mastery of calligraphy, an art she began learning with her father from a young age. She was trained at an academy by China’s master in calligraphy and ink painting, and won national competitions. In 1986, she moved to Japan where she was also widely celebrated and exhibited. Her painting style would come to blend and blur influences from Chinese calligraphy, Gutai she encountered in Japan and Abstract Expressionism, and to cleverly combine traditional, technical techniques and skill with vivid, bold emotion, materials and colour.

Shizen is a rare chance to see Zhenggang’s work in the UK, and some twenty-one recent paintings are featured, all of them unfalteringly beautiful. De Pury writes: “Despite her prominence, Lou Zhenggang is entirely dedicated to her craft and uninterested in promoting her own work. She has abandoned travel, avoids distractions, and keeps studio visits rare, choosing instead to devote all her time to painting. Fortunately, her admirers and collectors—moved by the depth and power of her work—have taken it upon themselves to champion her art on the global stage.”

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Dates
22 April 2025 — 24 May 2025

Viewing Rachel Rossin: The Totalists at Albion Jeune

A final unmissable solo show for The Wick is Rachel Rossin, an exciting young American artist based in New York who has engineered and programmed AI software to make paintings and installations, showing at Albion Jeune until June.

Rossin’s The Totalists is a fascinating confrontation with technology and tradition, between the organic and the synthetic, and what these things might mean both for painting and for humans more widely. Thinking about the ‘black box’, for example – a system whose internal workings are unknown to the user – has influenced several pieces in the show, attempts to visual the invisible structures that record and shape our existence.

There are references to VR, AI-generated patterns and traditional painting techniques, and Rossin also layers paint to emulate glitch effects and screen artifacts, while her chosen hues often remind us of the eerie glow of screens. It’s a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to create, and to resist, in the AI-era. “Art is one of the only places that isn’t asking you for your data—it’s asking you to think for yourself,” Rossin reflects.

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Dates
24 April 2025 — 01 June 2025
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