February has arrived: galleries reopen after swapping out their winter exhibitions for the shows that will see us into spring, promising lots to visit across London this month.
The feminist power of photo collage arrives in two separate – and very different – installations at Hayward Gallery on South Bank, while the anticipated The Face: Culture Shift opens at the National Portrait Gallery.
Including rare photographs from Nigeria’s capital, Lagos, to fashion photography and a tribute to flowers, these are the best exhibitions in London to visit this February.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Hayward Gallery
Despite a fifty-year long career and a creative contribution to feminist art, Hayward Gallery’s Danger Came Smiling marks the first London retrospective of the artist Linder. Widely recognised for her photomontage work spanning a variety of materials and subject matters such as textiles, film, perfume, music, fashion and more, Linder’s work offers a rich tapestry of underground art movements and changing feminist ideas across time and culture. “The found images in my work are often quite fragile both materially and conceptually, it doesn’t take much then to hijack them and to take them somewhere far more surreal,” Linder explains. Danger Came Smiling starts in the creative turbulence of the 1970s punk scene in Manchester, a time that Linder was directly immersed in as part of the punk band Ludus. Her work began with her designing the collaged album covers for both Ludus and other contemporary musicians; covers that are still widely recognised as leading images of the British punk scene. The exhibition continues to cover Linder’s challenging of gender stereotypes and aesthetic convention, carefully done through both humour and poetry across her career. Talking about her debut London exhibition, Linder enthuses that the Hayward Gallery’s “Brutalist architecture is the perfect foil for the delicacy of the print ephemera I’ve worked with for over half a century”.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, Hayward Gallery
The collage and photomontage theme continues at Hayward Gallery. Following a successful run at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles – co-organised by Hayward Gallery and marking Mickalene Thomas’ first international tour – Mickalene Thomas’ powerful portraits return to the UK capital. With a title taken from canonical feminist author bell hooks, All About Love by artist Mickalene Thomas is a visual examination of motherhood, pop culture, mass media, the politics of power, sexuality, and the complexities of femininity that bell’s essay collection also questions. Thomas comments that “my gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.” Love appears in all its forms here; romantic, familial, self-love, even the type of ‘love’ that you can feel for people you have never met. The exhibition collates many different artistic forms including photographs, collages, figurative paintings – often mimicking the poses and compositions of 19th-century French paintings, but reconfigured to re-evaluate the painter-subject power dynamic.
Flowers - Flora In Contemporary Art & Culture, Saatchi Gallery
Gestures of romance, markers of the seasons and muses for art – dating from antiquity to the contemporary – flowers have always played an important, but varying, role in culture. Saatchi Gallery is tributing an entire exhibition to the role of flora in contemporary creative work, spanning fashion, photography, body painting, archival objects, sketches, paintings, and more. The gallery has acquired over 500 works to pull the exhibition together: six hyperrealist floral brooches by Buccellati, including the bejewelled 1929 Orchid; images by Nick Knight; tattoo work by Daniel The Gardener; and designs by Finnish lifestyle brand Marimekko, plus British designers Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood. A highlight of the exhibition is the installation of 100,000 dried flowers by artist Rebecca Louise Law that takes over an entire room for a very photographic moment, proving the mystical allure flowers continue to have today.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, National Portrait Gallery
The self-defined “world’s best dressed magazine” is proving its status as a ground-breaking publication, one that set the threshold for creativity in pop culture and spotlighted emerging talent across the eighties, nineties, naughties, (still continuing today) in Britain with Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery. This exhibition has been at the forefront of fashion enthusiasts’ ‘to-visit’ exhibitions, and it’s finally opening this month. Since the first issue hit the shelves in May 1980, The Face magazine has photographed – and dressed – a cultural undercurrent of artists from Madonna to Kate Moss, and, for many, helped establish their success and status in the pop industry. Over 200 prints by more than 80 photographers including David LaChapelle, Juergen Teller and Corinne Day will illustrate The Face’s sartorial legacy and lasting creative impact on British (and global) culture.
From The Roster, Hamiltons Gallery
Small but mighty, this independent gallery in London has represented and exhibited some of the biggest names in photography and art across the world. Starting the new year off with a recap, From the Roster will feature a few of the artists who have previously graced the gallery walls, including Steven Meisel, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts and Guido Mocafico, among many others. The works in the exhibition are tied together with an overarching theme of the extra-ordinary, whether through exaggerated forms, superlative depictions of beauty, or unique landscapes and imagery. Despite the theme, the photographs and artworks throughout the exhibition have been produced across different times and settings, to display the ever-evolving tastes in art.
At Home: Alice Neel In The Queer World, Victoria Miro
Alice Neel’s portrait work is so honest that it can make even the viewer feel self-conscious. Shying away from nothing, the artist constantly places the individual and their context in clear view. For At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, the enigmatic curator and writer Hilton Als – who also authored the exhibition book – has focussed on Neel’s paintings of the her peers from Queer communities, including dancers, writers, artists and neighbours. As Hilton Als outlines “as an artist, Neel gave so many people their name – the right to their name. So doing, she told us that no person is fixed: we have as many names as the lies we tell, the truths we live.”
Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit Of Lagos, Autograph Gallery
When husband-and-wife duo John Abe and Funmilayo Abe founded the art gallery Abi Morocco in Lagos to capture the energetic spirit of the Nigerian capital across the 1970s, they perhaps didn’t expect it to also serve as an international legacy and archive for these Nigerian artists. Now, almost ten years after the gallery closed its doors in 2006, the gallery’s vibrant photography collection is on display in London’s Shoreditch, covering moments of celebration, snapshots from everyday life, and lots in between. The exhibition at Autograph ABP not only showcases Lagos’ strong roster of photographic talent but also the efforts of Abi Morocco to preserve and commemorate their work.
Peter Hujar: Eyes Open In The Dark, Raven Row
Peter Hujar’s dramatic and outlandish black and white photography paints an underside to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, from performance artists to derelict streets. Eyes Open in the Dark examines Hujar’s later work as the AIDS crisis dominated the communities he frequented, an epidemic Hujar himself could not escape. Unconventionally so, Hujar’s photographs can be appreciated for their emotional tenderness and rawness.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth Of Modernism, Royal Academy
Characterised by a turn away from convention in the search for the new, modernism has always felt a nebulous term in the art world. Across Europe, modernism spread like wildfire at the turn of the 20th century thanks to ground-breaking work by the likes of French artist Louise Bourgeois, British writer Virginia Woolf, and Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez (among many, many others). Yet, at the same time, modernism was picking up the pace across Brazil. Now a century on from its beginnings, The Royal Academy in London is exhibiting 130 works by ten core Brazilian artists which each creatively question Indigenous identity and Afro-Brazilian experience from the 1910s to the 1970s. This influential lineup includes Tarsila do Amaral, who is now considered a leading female figure of the nation’s modernist movement, and will span performance artists, painters, and more.
Still showing …
Naomi: In Fashion, V&A Museum, London, UK
One of fashion’s most iconic figures, Naomi Campbell, has carried fashion through some of its greatest eras and designers under the esteemed ‘supermodel’ title, and is trading runways for the marbled hallways of the V&A. Sponsored by fashion label Boss, Naomi: In Fashion traces Campbell’s extensive four-decade career – from becoming the first Black model to feature on the cover of Vogue Paris in August 1988 aged just 18, to transforming the runway with her legendary, confident strut (featured in the exhibition via a series of video clips) and launching her own perfume line. The exhibition uses many different mediums to tell her story, including video, photography and clothing, and moves from Naomi’s childhood to the present day. Highlights include a selection of photography by Arthur Elgort and Patrick Demarchelier – curated by Edward Enninful OBE – as well as dresses made specifically for Campbell by the likes of Valentino and Azzedine Alaïa. In a recent press conference Naomi Campbell says the show is for – and tributes – “everyone who has been good to me.” This is a beautiful time capsule of some of fashion’s greatest people and moments.
The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain
Britian’s years under Thatcher rule in the 1980s were known to be turbulent. And this exhibition forms a body of photographs that documents the social and cultural impact of the shifting political legislation. From the miners’ strikes to gentrification and the AIDS pandemic, protest defined the voice of the British public facing this strife. The 80s: Photographing Britain highlights how photography gave voice to social change led by the people, and consequently became a tool for loudening marginalised voices.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage, The Photographers' Gallery, London
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do. I’m not really a fashion photographer.” – Deborah Turbeville in The New Yorker, 2011. Five women stand in a bathhouse, idly and elegantly poised, with only one looking at the camera. We know this photograph is staged, but it feels like we’ve walked straight into the women’s locker room. No-one can quite manage to capture the transient richness of a passing moment like Deborah Turbeville. This image, taken for Vogue in 1975, controversially shifted the standards of fashion photography: Deborah Turbeville’s style was far from the clean-cut, sharp editorial that graced glossy magazine pages in the late 20th century. In her shots, clothes take a backseat and a whimsical, wintry atmosphere comes first. There’s an element of the female psyche that rings through her atmospheric compositions – something that until then had been altogether excluded from fashion editorial. The Photographers’ Gallery is revisiting the impact of Turbeville’s work with this retrospective exhibition featuring some of her most iconic editorial and advertorial work. To accompany it, lots of Turbeville’s personal, vintage photocollages will be on display; the artist was known to experiment – just like she did with her composition, colour and lighting – in the darkroom, ripping up sketchbooks and photographic novels, and collaging them with her own images for striking results.
A Group Exhibition, Cadogan Gallery
Founded in 1980, Cadogan Gallery has brought contemporary artists to the forefront of London’s Belgravia, as well as Milan, for the past forty years. Cadogan have opened their new flagship gallery on Harriet Street in South Kensington, inaugurating the space with an impressive group exhibition featuring 21 artists defining current art trends. The focus of Cadogan Gallery: A Group Exhibition is on the rich materiality of abstraction in contemporary art, meaning the variety of ways in which artists express non-representational – or abstract – forms. From surreal landscape paintings to sculptures fashioned from marble, the exhibition spotlights the innovative creativity of the artists of our time.
The Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, Fashion And Textile Museum
It’s 1985 and Taboo nightclub has just opened in London’s Leicester Square. The venue by designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery, known for their flamboyant costumes and conceptual art, was nothing short of a scene in London’s nightlife – a work of art itself. The ‘dress as though your life depends on it’ dress code drew the city’s avant-garde, sartorial crowds from far-flung boroughs – and now the evidence is strung on the gallery walls of Bermondsey’s Fashion and Textile Museum. Rare pieces from John Galliano, John Fleet, Stephen Lenard and more are on show, displayed next to the music scene that helped bring the clothes to life.
The Taylor Wessing Photography Prize, The National Portrait Gallery
The Taylor Wessing prize is the annual photography prize awarded by The National Portrait Gallery, and the winner of the 2024 award is British photographer Steph Wilson, who has worked for Mugler, Simone Rocha, Nike, as well as publications including Dazed, i-D, and more, for their project titled Ideal Mother. Wilson explores unconventional images and models of ‘motherhood’, a term that is still widely associated with dated and heteronormative ideals. Awarded as runners up are Australian photographer Adam Ferguson and Dutch photographer Tjitske Sluis. If you’d like to experience the avant-garde work of modern day photographers and perhaps add a few new favourites to your list, then this is the exhibition to help you do so.
Lead image: Abi Morocco Photos, Aina Street, Shogunle, Lagos, 1976. Courtesy Lagos Studio Archives. Copyright © Abi Morocco Photos
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