Take a bus down Shoreditch High Street at night and the windows of The Clerk’s House, the historic building that houses Emalin, are tinted red and yellow by the fluorescent light from two 1987 works by Dan Flavin, Untitled (to V. Mayakovsky) 1 and Untitled (to Rainer) 2. Brought to Emalin by New York gallery Peter Freeman, Inc., the strip lights (left on all night) are shown alongside paintings by Anna Clegg. In front of the glowing red homage to Mayakovsky is a tender image of a schoolkid at their desk, rendered in a cinematic POV (Interior 21, 2025); upstairs, in front of the work dedicated to Donald Judd’s daughter Rainer, is a small painting rendered from the angle of someone lying on a couch inside a darkened room whose open door leads to a bright landing (Interior 19, 2025). Clegg’s remarkable sense of space complements the rare experience of seeing Flavin’s works in an intimate, non-white-cube environment.
This presentation is part of Condo, a project now in its tenth year in which galleries from one city host their international counterparts. With fifty galleries participating, this year’s edition offered a variety of interpretations of this host-guest relationship—some galleries give over a side space; some stage group shows—but many of the best exhibitions focused on two artists, whose presentation side-by-side was to the benefit of both.
In a small annex at The Approach, New York’s Margot Samel brought together two artists from Philadelphia, Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia. Johnson, who passed away in 2022, made small sculptures shaped like homes out of found materials—wood, photographs, bits of pavement and signage—that he gathered on walks and then transformed into arrangements that feel both personal and documentary, reflections on a changing city by someone who has lived in it all their life. Jia, born in 1994, paints objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in Page unfolded [dish with flowers and birds, 1561], 2026, a trompe-l’oeil for a folded piece of paper with a print of a decorative plate) and family members (Portrait of my grandmother, lily opening, 2026) in a palette the artist describes as “nocturnal”—grays, cool blues—and which gives the exhibition a melancholic note. Seen together, these two artists from different generations and cultural backgrounds present a coherent image of work being made in the USA: work that insists on the country’s inherent multiplicity. Two views combine to produce a more complete image of a disrupted place.
At Hollybush Gardens, which hosts Switzerland’s Galerie Tschudi, the co-presentation of Bethan Huws and Andrea Büttner is to the mutual advantage of two artists whose work is filled with references to art history. Huws’s Painting Panel (2020) looks like a framed high-art obsession wall, with forty A4 photocopies of pages from art history books and artworks alongside Post-it notes tracing different connections between the reproduced works and those of Marcel Duchamp. Büttner’s Kunstgeschichte des Bückens (Art History of Bending) (2021) uses the classic lecture format of juxtaposing two 35 mm slides to trace representations of bent figures at work, from Ancient Egypt to Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857). Seeing eighty of these pairs in a loop creates a visual history of the endlessness of labor.
At TINA, one room is dedicated to the work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, a Benedictine monk who lived in Gloucestershire but traveled frequently to London, where he befriended avant-garde artists and explored his homosexuality. On an Olivetti typewriter, he made concrete poems that referenced mysticism (a drawing with the letters OM in the middle, surrounded by a circle of letters as if it were a clock) and feelings (a drawing of a cube in blue and red inks, below it one typed line: “rare jewel of discontent”). Houédard’s typewriter letters are echoed by Tris Vonna-Michell (represented by Brussels’s Jan Mot), whose To Ray the Rays is an edited version of a 1985 film by the artist’s father, made in collaboration with Henri Chopin (1922–2008). Attesting to a creative life that the artist only discovered when clearing his father’s home after his death in 2020, the eight-minute film combines an echoey metallic soundtrack with colorful, abstract letter forms swirling and moving. If this is reminiscent of other experimental films of the period, it is enriched here by the relationships—between Vonna-Michell and his father, between the father and Chopin, and between this work and Houédard’s—that underpin it.
Another memorable combination is between Paride Maria Calvia and Hubert Duprat at Brunette Coleman, which hosts Galleria ZERO…, Milan. In a vitrine, Duprat presents three tiny tubes made of gold, pearls, sapphire, and rubies from his series “Tube de trichoptère” (1980–ongoing). These extraordinary, jewellike objects were made by leaving fragments of precious materials beside caddisflies, mothlike insects who make tubular nests which they later abandon. Calvia’s Blowing coat (2023–26) is another work made with animal residues, for which the artist forms spheres from pig hair which he washes and hand rolls. The balls of hair scattered all over the floor feel like an intrusion of nature into the artifice of the gallery, only in this match-up the natural world offers art through process.
At The Sunday Painter, C. Mae Bloom’s “Moments before seconds after” presents a long white table on which the artist has arranged a multitude of tiny sculptures—a Stonehenge made of erasers, two foldable alarm clocks set on top of each other to make the rudimentary shape of a house, a small owl-like seal (or is it a seal-like owl?) made of soft plastic. These dollhouse sculptures are made funny, strange, and memorable by the meetings between them—the art here consists in the combination of elements, arguing for display as the artistic method itself, not just a curatorial or exhibition conceit.
Back at Hollybush Gardens, in Huws’ video Zone (2013), shots of water birds are set to a woman reading Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1912 poem “Zone” in French. It feels like a New Wave film in its combination of a voiceover with images that only seem to match at certain moments: “And from America there comes a hummingbird / From China sinuous peehees / Who have only one wing and who fly in couples.” These mythological Chinese birds, biyiniao, which have one eye and one wing and must attach to one another in order to fly, are traditionally a symbol of lasting love. But also: two things together create new meaning. An encounter between artists, galleries, viewers, and artworks, objects that do not belong together except in the vision of an artist. Call it a collaborative exhibition, call it hosting, call it curating: these displays suggest that when diverse things meet, they offer a new angle on the other’s world.
