London Gallery Weekend

Eleven years ago, Dan Fox wrote that “New York is a painting town,” that oil on canvas is the city’s “true love.”1 It was the time of zombie formalism, abstract paintings everywhere and a market voracious for more. What you saw in galleries matched what was selling in auction houses and it felt like the medium itself was bound to collectors’ whims.

Now London, too, is a painting town. And yet, while a large majority of the exhibitions on view during London Gallery Weekend are focused on painting, some things have changed. Today’s paintings offer new ideas that feel contemporary even when read or presented in relation to historical work, a genuine renewal rather than opportunistic revivalism.

At first sight, the paintings by Chicago-based artist Katelyn Eichwald at Cob Gallery can seem made for Instagram. They are tiny, square, and very detailed, like the painting of a chandelier (Sleepless) or the girly bow on a pair of underwear (They Say You Were Something In Those Formative Years, both 2025). At this scale—the first measures 15 by 15 cm, the second 10 by 10—it may be tempting to photograph the painting in order to be able to zoom in on the texture of the thin paint on rough burlap or linen. But standing in front of them, it is the intimacy of these contained, mundane, minute subjects—flowers in vases, a bra, a blooming field—that offers a view of the world that is unabashedly feminine, a pink-hued aesthetic that is so often dismissed as youthful and transitory. The paintings are small but, like a teenage girl’s bedroom, they make their own world and argue for their place, and their necessity, within it.

And, anyway, what if these paintings photograph well? In the past, I might have considered this a flaw, as if one barely needed to see them for oneself, but a relationship to screens is one of the dominant mediating experiences of daily life, and this week I found myself pulling out my phone to show people Jordan Casteel’s Elizabeth and Roman II (2025), on view at Ropac. In this tender portrait a mother and child, in jeans and coats outside their home, look directly toward us, as if posing for a photograph rather than a painting. I also kept returning to a photo of the salon display of Eve Ackroyd’s warm paintings of a family at Workplace, to zoom in on paintings like Untitled (Monday Night) and Blue Dog (both 2025), respectively depicting a couple in a bed facing each other and the pet curled up. Both images of sleep, gentle ways of viewing and reflecting home life.

If portraits and domestic scenes have a long lineage in the history of painting, then a couple of historical shows remind viewers of the many possibilities the medium offers. At Sylvia Kouvali, Luigi Zuccheri (1904–74) worked in tempera on wood or board, a technique most closely associated with the Byzantine era that results in dark, rich panels. His paintings of villages and animals, religious men in garb, and still life are detailed and dramatic, with a curtain-like treatment of the sky in some works calling to mind Caravaggio. At Thomas Dane Gallery, one room is dedicated to Paul Thek’s paintings of cityscapes and the other to seascapes. These are painted on yellowing newspaper, the date and headlines still visible through the quick impression of sunset at sea (Untitled [Landscape], 1973) or the view through a window (Untitled [Sun through window], 1987). It’s a true discovery, providing an extensive, informative, and experiential view into a lesser-shown element of an artist best known for his sculpture.

At Emalin, the relationship to art history is the premise. “Nuit” matches the large paintings of LA-based artist Kate Spencer Stewart with a portfolio of small lithographs made by Odilon Redon in 1886. They are spread throughout the small, irregular spaces of this eighteenth-century house, from which a nightwatchman used to guard the neighboring graveyard from body snatchers. In the attic, a lithograph called à la VIEILLESSE (Old Age) leads to a single yellow-gold and silver-white abstract painting, Chime (2025), which hangs off two screws in a wooden beam, unfastened, swaying. Matching contemporary with historical works can often seem like a cynical attempt to add value to both, and while there isn’t a clear connection between a portfolio started in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and contemporary life in Los Angeles (though there may well be soon), this exhibition is a highlight of the weekend. These works share an atmosphere of darkness and attentiveness, like a standing-guard, that justifies their display together and enhances them both.

Also drawing on historical material, Jimmy Robert’s “The Erotics of Passage” at Thomas Dane Gallery’s second space features photography and sculpture interspersed with texts—poetry by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha, quotes from Marguerite Duras—collated from a letter to the artist from art historian Elvan Zabunyan. Printed and placed on the wall, these texts are conflated with small, gentle works like the drawing on purple tissue paper fastened to the wall with two nails, blowing in the wind (The Erotics of Passage IV, 2025). The result is a single installation that is tender, and intimate, and serious.

Also combining language with images, Rosemary Mayer’s works on paper at Hollybush Garden combine poetic phrases (“Can you stay up late?”; “Moon Shadow”) with spontaneous brushwork; these are interspersed with fabric sculptures suggesting scarecrows and landscapes. The most haunting words I read this weekend were in Vicky Đỗ’s politically charged video From Now On (2017). The video, on view as part of a group show at SLQS, looks at the history of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong since the 1970s. It includes interviews with members of the diaspora still living on the island and starts with a chilling sequence in which Hong Kong immigration rules are spelled out in white text against a black background, set to the soundtrack of a clandestine recording of a conversation at an immigration center.

The introduction of language into these works lends them a certain directness. But what they offer—a relationship to other people in Mayer’s drawings, to other people’s work in Robert’s exhibition, to some people’s power over others in Đỗ’s video—is also there in the intense humanism of Casteel’s gaze, the feminism of Eichwald and Ackroyd’s work, and the emotional tenor of Thek’s landscapes. This opportunity to engage with other people’s view of the world is what art offers. And thinking about painting during this edition of London Gallery Weekend offers its own lesson: that it’s possible to look again at something you thought you knew and find something unexpected.

London Gallery Weekend took place from June 6 through 8.