What to See During London Gallery Weekend 2025

Base Materialism | Albion Jeune | 5 June – 30 August

French thinker Georges Bataille is the starting point for this rich group show at Albion Jeune, which takes its title from his conceptualization of an unstable base matter that undermines hierarchies of beauty and form. This upending of high and low – how it relates to our bodies and, in turn, social dynamics – ripples through the work of seven artists, all of whom are based in New York. Perhaps evidenced most clearly in the drooling, bronze-capped genitalia of Ivana Bašić’s Pneumatic Positions II: Blossoming (2023), ideas of abjection and bodily order also prove a fruitful framing for the ghostly oils of Shuo Hao and the chrome organs that fill the canvases of Rachel Rossin. 

Katelyn Eichwald | Cob Gallery | 29 May – 21 June

There’s an ache of yearning at Cob Gallery on Lamb’s Conduit Street. Blossom, lace, a flock of distant birds against the setting sun; the small, hazy paintings of US artist Katelyn Eichwald are snapshots from the emotional theatre of adolescence, all daydreams and hidden longing. Titles like I Wake Up Crying, Love Ridden and I Would Die for You in Secret (all works 2025) play to the melodrama of young romance, but there is an uncanny lack of any particular object of devotion. Instead, it is as if wanting is its own aim. Here, Eichwald’s tightly cropped canvases frame the materials and accessories of girlhood longing as votive symbols, making something mythic from teenage obsession. 

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 | William Hine | 6 June – 19 July

Eight statues of forgotten deities seem to have been excavated in Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊’s solo show at William Hine. Sitting atop muddy piles, these glazed ceramic forms are, in fact, inspired by microorganisms scooped from the pond outside the artist’s family home in Edinburgh. To what extent should these tiny creatures, invisible to the human eye yet underpinning the complex ecosystems we inhabit, inspire our devotion? Song draws from Daoist tradition as much as contemporary fables and scientific research, putting these elements into play as part of a multifaceted take on family, environment and ritual-making.

Jordan Casteel | Thaddaeus Ropac | 9 April – 8 June

Jordan Casteel often begins her vast portraits by painting the canvas a singular field of colour, using this to set what she describes as an ‘aura’ for the figures that follow. In the case of Elizabeth and Roman II (2025), the centrepiece of this show at Thaddaeus Ropac, the aura is electric pink. It imbues almost all aspects of the scene – from the lips of the mother to the hair of the child she carries, through the garden that surrounds them. The thick coats the pair wear, alongside the buds on the trees, suggest spring is on its way. This blooming is pitched against two others: a bouquet captured on an orange seat (Subway Bouquet, 2025) and the quieter image Iris (2024) painted en plein air in the artist’s garden.  

Polyphonies | Ames Yavuz | 6 – 26 June

Taking its cue from the musical term for many sounds playing at the same time, ‘Polyphonies’ groups an international array of 11 artists who challenge assumptions about the hierarchies of voice and language. Lizi Sánchez’s vast mobile, Transcripción 15 (2025), is a tangle of transcribed notes from a conversation – a knot of speech made physical. Elsewhere, Ibrahim Ahmed’s chimera of archival textiles stitches together a history of circulated materials across the Middle East and North Africa, while Betty Muffler’s dense canvases translate the topography of Australia’s First Peoples’ Country into a visual language. Everywhere you look, there are tongues wagging in ways that test dominant notions of what language is and how it is heard.

Emmanuel Massillon and Allen-Golder Carpenter | Harlesden High Street | 6 June – 13 July

Allen-Golder Carpenter and Emmanuel Massillon, both based in Washington, D.C., are deeply engaged with that city’s sociopolitical landscape – particularly its intersection with the US judicial system. Over the 72 hours of London Gallery Weekend, Harlesden High Street gallery will be turned into a prison cell. Carpenter will be an inmate for the duration, interacting with a number of installations made by himself and Massillon. An unfiltered glimpse of incarceration or a voyeuristic spectacle? Expect an uncomfortable viewing experience for those passing by, peering through the glass front of the gallery. 

Gregor Hildebrandt | Almine Rech | 6 June – 26 July

Music is material for Gregor Hildebrandt. The German artist has long been interested in the tension between the physical artefacts of music recording and their intangible contents, often incorporating audiotape, VHS, vinyl and record sleeves into his image-making. The abstract smear of This emptiness fills my heart (P.G. in your eyes) (2021), for example, is composed of specially recorded cassette tape that has been applied to the canvas and then ripped off, leaving its magnetic coating behind. The remaining tape is then applied to another canvas, creating a negative second image. Elsewhere, there are columns of warped blue vinyl and tangles of mounted VHS strips: silent objects charged with sound.

^{Main image: Lizi Sánchez, Transcripción 15, 2025, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Ames Yavuz, London}