London Gallery Weekend Returns With Christo, Shao Fan, and Anne Imhof
London Gallery Weekend will open its sixth edition from June 5 to 7, bringing more than 120 galleries across the city into a single, tightly choreographed circuit of exhibitions, performances, talks, and special events. Launched in 2021, the initiative has quickly become one of the most useful snapshots of London’s commercial gallery scene — not because it tries to flatten the city into one story, but because it reveals how differently artists are working with memory, material, and space right now.
Among the most closely watched presentations is “Air” at Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill, on view through Aug. 21. The exhibition looks back to the conceptual roots of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s practice, pairing early works and archival material with the first-ever realization of “Air Package on a Ceiling,” a work conceived in 1968 and never previously produced. The show also includes “Wrapped Automobile—Volvo, Model PV-544,” which is being shown publicly for the first time in three decades, turning an ordinary car into something at once theatrical and strangely elusive.
At White Cube in Mason’s Yard, Beijing-based artist Shao Fan presents “Refrain / 复沓,” his first exhibition in the U.K. The installation centers on carefully rendered ink-on-rice-paper paintings of rabbits, apples, cabbages, and other singular forms. The works draw on Song dynasty traditions while quietly folding in Western art history, from Dutch still life to Georgia O’Keeffe and Albrecht Dürer. The result is less illustrative than meditative: familiar objects seem to hover between presence and recollection.
Sprüth Magers will open “Citizen” by Anne Imhof on June 5, with the exhibition running through Aug. 1. Imhof, who won the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for “Faust,” has spent the past decade building a practice that moves between performance, painting, music, sculpture, and film. Her work often stages bodies in states of suspension — between intimacy and distance, exhaustion and control — and “Citizen” extends ideas she explored in recent projects including “DOOM: House of Hope” and “Fun ist ein Stahlbad” at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal.
Elsewhere in the weekend program, London galleries will also present collaborative work by Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska in “Zanzibar” at Lisson Gallery. Taken together, the lineup suggests a citywide event less interested in spectacle for its own sake than in the slower, more durable questions that continue to animate contemporary art: how images hold memory, how objects change when they are concealed, and how installation can alter the terms of looking.
