Your London Exhibition Guide

Welcome to the concrete jungle. A raucous menagerie greets visitors to Herald St this month, where Michael Dean has unleashed an irreverent horde of rebar-reinforced pandas. Dancing through a wilderness grown from construction sites and rubbish heaps, the bears invite you to play with the semiotics of nature à la Roland Barthes… if that’s what you’re into. If not, don’t worry, for Dean’s delight in texture and form, and his ultimately tender reflection on nature’s precarity, are more than enough to carry the show. Humour helps you make sense of heavy subjects, and Dean’s cheeky approach, combined with a true sculptural beauty, is both engaging and refreshing.

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For a surrealist escape, look up into Luchita Hurtado’s works from her Sky Skin series. If you’ve ever been out west in America, they’ll feel familiar. They take after the craggy earth and mountains of New Mexico, formed in a way that creates a portal into blue skies. Feathers, stars, and clouds float within her compositions, instilling this sense of freedom within yourself. These works contrast her I Am series, which take a more self-reflective approach (they feature her body and domestic objects painted from the perspective of looking down in front of herself). You could say Sky Skin lends itself to self-reflection too. These are all about the cosmos and how humans, animals, and nature are all connected. 

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Do you plan your weekends around flea markets and car-boot sales? Are you lured across the street by a cardboard box marked “FREE?” Lonnie Holley not only shares your fascination for cast-off objects, he has turned it into a rich and moving artistic practice. The pieces Holley assembled for his latest London show are made mostly of detritus collected during trips to Orford Ness, a coastal spit that served for decades as a military testing site. The work meshes a sense of sinister experimentation with the emotional significance industrial objects held for Holley during his childhood in the American South. Severed from their original function, the artifacts take new forms that tease and tinker with your imagination.

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These days, digital imagery might not warrant a double take. But peep at the wall text for Charlotte Johannesson’s works and you’ll be surprised to see most of these works were made in the 80s and 90s. At a time when computer programming was starting to take off, she went the other way and applied digital aesthetics in more tangible ways. You’ll find paintings and prints, but her textiles are the true stars of the show. The cross-stitched images are rendered in such a way that uncannily reflect those thick pixels of an old computer screen. If you thought retro graphics were out of style, they’re more timeless than ever. 

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Lily Van der Stokker takes her fun very seriously. A self-styled “professor of the paint-mix science,” she approaches her work with a rigorous methodology that produces joyful paintings. Pushing back against prevailing ideas that art must be somber to be serious, she paints bursts of flowers, loopy monochrome blobs, and abstract geometric patterns vaguely reminiscent of Ikea shower curtains. It quickly becomes clear, however, that her paintings are hardly one-dimensional. Yes, they trade in joy and exuberance (which are by no means bad things!), but they also question patriarchal hierarchies of what proper art should be. Van der Stokker thus positions herself firmly in a line of feminist artists using “frivolous” means to explore the charged themes of relationships, home, and work.

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