Proposition Bethnal Green
21 Nov 2025 – 14 Feb 2026
After Nature comes to Proposition’s Bethnal Green gallery from CLOSE gallery Somerset, a re-contextualisation of the group exhibition curated by Ben Tufnell, bringing together long-established masters of land and environmental art such as Richard Long and David Nash alongside a younger generation of artists looking to renegotiate humanity’s place in a fragile ecology.
Originally displayed in a rural setting at CLOSE gallery in Somerset, After Nature engaged in a quiet dialogue with its wild surroundings. There, sculptures, earthy pigments, and natural materials echoed the landscape outside. Now transplanted into the heart of London, in one of the world’s most urbanised environments, those same works strike a different — possibly even more urgent — chord.
Some pieces draw on raw natural processes: Long’s dramatic mud works, or sculptures and drawings made with ash, dust or recycled pigments; others imagine new relationships between species and spaces — for example, installations that evoke the perspective of pollinators or experiments in ecological re-awakening. At a moment when climate crisis and biodiversity loss are no longer abstract concerns but daily reality, After Nature becomes a gesture of resistance and reflection. Through its earthy materials and delicate forms, the exhibition speaks to what has been lost — but also points toward what might still be reclaimed.
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Dates
21 November 2025 — 14 February 2026
Viewing Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner
Diane Arbus’ explosive and subversive work is well known, yet this is a rare chance to get up close with it in London, in a careful and compelling curation of 45 photographs at David Zwirner gallery (until 20 December). The works were all made between 1961 and 1971 – the decade before Arbus’ major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.
The show’s title suggests a private, inner world and the photographs on display focus on settings that invite and evoke intimacy, taken in bedrooms and hotel rooms, Arbus’ subjects’ sacred space. Her subjects are socialites and transvestites, nudists and disabled people, debutantes all of them fundamentally – humans.
Arbus’ photographs challenged conventions about who should be seen and looked at, where beauty might be found and celebrated, and questioned what ‘normal’ looked like. She was aware of the discomfort and awkwardness her intended audience might feel at her pictures, too – and the impossibility of truly representing another person in a picture. In her own words, “what I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s…. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.”
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Dates
06 November 2025 — 20 December 2025
Viewing Rock, Paper, Scissors at CLOSE Gallery
Above Anya Paintsil, Indigestion 2025, Pawb Art Gallery, photography courtesy of Harry Meadley
CLOSE Gallery
29 November, 2025 – 17 January, 2026
Rock Paper Scissors opens at CLOSE Gallery in Somerset this week, a compelling group exhibition conceived around the simplicity and spontaneity of the eponymous playground game. The show draws parallels between its three gestures and the elemental relationships between hand, material, and imagination.
Featuring twelve artists including Kate McGwire, Ted Rogers, Hew Locke, Nicholas Lees, and Peter Randall-Page, the exhibition emphasises raw materials — stone, wood, fibre, feathers, found fragments, and pigment. The works foreground pared-back, handcrafted processes, allowing the tactile, evocative qualities of natural matter to narrate the works.
It’s also an exhibition about play and celebrating the resourcefulness of creativity. The motif of “rock, paper, scissors” becomes a metaphor for decision-making, balance, and opposition—as the works presented negotiate contrasts between weight and lightness, solidity and fragility, tension and repose. In the unique and serene setting of CLOSE’s glorious Somerset space, this elemental and poetic exhibition invites visitors to contemplate the fundamental and universal aspects of making.