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Viewing All About Eve at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

The Wick Culture - Afifa Aleiby, Daphne and Apollo 2024. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde and artist.

Above Afifa Aleiby, Daphne and Apollo 2024. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde and artist.

The Wick Culture - Citra Sasmita. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde and artist.

Above Citra Sasmita. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde and artist.

The Wick Culture - Gordon Cheung, Legend of the Lake (Nanjing), 2025. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and artist.

Above Gordon Cheung, Legend of the Lake (Nanjing), 2025. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and artist.

The Wick Culture - Zayn Qahtani, Cosmic Venus (I Would Spill My Guts Out To Watch You Come Alive), 2025. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and artist.

Above Zayn Qahtani, Cosmic Venus (I Would Spill My Guts Out To Watch You Come Alive), 2025. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and artist.

Above Afifa Aleiby, Daphne and Apollo 2024. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde and artist.

Above Citra Sasmita. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde and artist.

Above Gordon Cheung, Legend of the Lake (Nanjing), 2025. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and artist.

Above Zayn Qahtani, Cosmic Venus (I Would Spill My Guts Out To Watch You Come Alive), 2025. Photo courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and artist.

All About Eve

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
7 February – 8 March 2025

All About Eve, is co-curated by artist Soheila Sokhanvari and gallery director Kristin Hjellegjerde, and references the 1950 film of the same title, which follows the tale of Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star, whose career is threatened by the younger, more ambitious Eve. From this premise of female rivalry, power and patriarchy, this exhibition is a thrilling look at gender-based inequality through the ages.

Sokhanvari and Hjellegjerde have drawn together some incredible works by leading contemporary artists, such as the vibrant, cosmological Kamasan cloth paintings of Balinese artist Citra Sasmita (currently showing at the Barbican’s Curve gallery) and the groundbreaking images of Lindsay Seers who turns herself into a camera by placing light-sensitive paper in her mouth, confronting the medium’s long history of objectification, especially of women.

Elsewhere, encounter extraordinary, arresting pieces on childbirth and motherhood by Sutapa Biswas, and the beautiful nacre sculptures of Zayn Qahtani, approaching the female body as a vessel not only for birth, but as a portal between the earth and cosmos. Through works by fourteen artists, this group show is revelatory and empowering, an original and compelling exploration of female creativity and triumph.

Viewing Thomas Ruff: expériences lumineuses at David Zwirner

The Wick Culture - Thomas Ruff, .l. n°05, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Above Thomas Ruff, .l. n°05, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

The Wick Culture - Thomas Ruff, untitled#19, 2022. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Above Thomas Ruff, untitled#19, 2022. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

The Wick Culture - Thomas Ruff, e.l. - n°10, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Above Thomas Ruff, e.l. – n°10, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Above Thomas Ruff, .l. n°05, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Above Thomas Ruff, untitled#19, 2022. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Above Thomas Ruff, e.l. – n°10, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Thomas Ruff: expériences lumineuses

David Zwirner
January 30—March 22, 2025

In his astonishing career – spanning from the 1970s to today – the German photographer Thomas Ruff has covered many of art’s major genres, from the nude to landscape to architectural photography, working in series, attempts to understand and unravel the ‘grammar of photography’. Photography, in essence, is Ruff’s subject and muse.

At this new exhibition – Ruff’s first London solo since his 2017 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition – Ruff unveils two recent series for the first time, explorations into photographic abstraction. At first, they look like charcoal drawings – as Susanna Brown, curator, points out. A staggering two metres tall, they reveal themselves as smoky, hazy photographs only on closer inspection.

Ruff employed an experimental process to produce these giant photographic abstractions, in a purpose-built studio. He arranged compositions of glass objects, such as mirrors and lesnes, on a whiteboard before exposing them to multiple beams of light. Working more like a scientist than an artist, Ruff explains ““There’s not one way of making photographs. There are thousands of possibilities you can choose from…. I am just interested in the result and if the result is worth discussing.”

Viewing Noah Davis at Barbican Art Gallery

The Wick Culture - Noah Davis, 1975 (8) 2013. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Above Noah Davis, 1975 (8) 2013. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

The Wick Culture - Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Above Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

The Wick Culture - Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio Arabesque, 2014. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Above Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio Arabesque, 2014. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Above Noah Davis, 1975 (8) 2013. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Above Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Above Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio Arabesque, 2014. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

Noah Davis

Barbican Art Gallery
Barbican Centre
6 February – 11 May, 2025

In his short life, Noah Davis made a huge difference with his art. The Seattle-born artist seemed destined to be an artist from a young age; his older brother, the filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, said by the age of 17 Davis had his own studio. He studied for a time at the Cooper Union, but did not graduate and moved to Los Angeles in 2004, where he began working in the MOCA bookstore. He first exhibited his paintings in 2007, quickly gaining a reputation for his elegiac, soft and melancholy-infused portraits, dreamlike and always conveying an immense feeling of dignity and care towards his subjects.

In 2012, Davis was already well-established, and together with his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, founded the Underground Museum, in Arlington Heights. It became a cultural hub and meeting point for many artists, curators, musicians and makers, hosting screenings, events and exhibitions. The final exhibition at the Undeground Museum was dedicated to Davis’ paintings, curated by Helen Molesworth, in 2022, seven years after his death from cancer in 2015 aged just 32.

Davis’ work has had an enormous impact, not only for his emotive, original style of painting but the inventiveness and potency of the scenes he depicted. Merging abstract and realistic modes, he created something unique. Now at last audiences in the UK have the chance to see Davis’ works in this retrospective, which includes more than fifty works, bound by the desire to ‘represent the people around me’, as the artist once put it. Don’t miss it.