June 5–7, 2026
How much of contemporary visual culture is defined by the attempts of people to sell us things? This is a pertinent question in the context of London Gallery Weekend, and no one asks it better than Sara Cwynar. Her seductive twenty-one-minute video Baby Blue Benzo (2024) floods the upstairs gallery at The Approach with images including a silver 1955 Mercedes Benz 300 SLR coupé (sold at auction for 142 million dollars in 2022), figure skaters in Marlboro-sponsored Formula 1 overalls, female models draped over a cutout car, old and new footage of Pamela Anderson, and the prescription sedative benzodiazepines (“Benzos”). A quick, screen-splitting edit gives a “behind-the-scenes” feel while capturing the visual overwhelm of our age, while music ranging from Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” (1886) to Charli XCX is combined with a voiceover asking what is “a good image” and pleading to “seduce me, please.” Cwynar’s work adopts the techniques of the industries it critiques to move past issues of circulation and commodification to assert that we see what we are shown.
Cwynar’s exhibition, which also includes a small installation with prints from the video, begins from an assumption about the overabundance of imagery. Yet rather than simply show how images move around today, it reflects on how and why they are made. Several other shows on view during London Gallery Weekend are also committed to exploring the production of images through history over their effect. What emerges is a history of viewing images, linked to a history of meaning, that is all but lost today.
At Soup, Ted Le Swer’s “Comrades, Sleep Faster!” takes its title from a Soviet satire on state propaganda. It includes five works made with different techniques of information capture, from a pinhole camera to a readymade Disney character. The forty-five gelatin silver prints in Image Sequence [UK Weather Surveillance Camera, day] (2026) are displayed in such a way as to bring home the endless stream of visual data produced by such technologies; Friesian Cow [Static] (2026) is a compound image of a sitting cow (a folk means of weather forecasting) that is reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of movement; a video shows Bambi skipping around the gallery space (After, Bambi, 2026). These small gestures destabilize the history of images from early photography, through pop culture, to contemporary surveillance.
Helen Marten’s This Weather (2025), on view at Sadie Coles HQ, is divided into five parts, each of which shows a different female character playing a role from childhood, through motherhood, to old age. While the script may be chronological, it is by no means predictable: each figure reads a monologue (Lover: “I encounter many people. I desire many of them”; Widow: “I know there are bursts of laughter to come”) against animated architectures including an abandoned office, an empty flat, and a flooded house. Marten picks and chooses from the rules of conventional narrative—there is linear progression, but no coherence between characters, for example—and produces something incredibly watchable, almost hypnotizing.
At Public, the viewer is confronted with Russell Perkins’ Static (2024), a six-channel audio installation of wind combined with a video collage of archival television footage of US electoral celebrations. The red or blue confetti pours down against the howl: a storm of this-has-all-happened-before. Stay (2018) diffuses a smell used at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, which is sweet in a dissociative way, creating an environment where the rules, from the passage of time to how money is made or lost, are different. Safe Harbor (2023–26), a series of graphic scores and a sound installation using quarterly reports from the stock market, calls to mind both concrete poetry and fridge magnets. Meaning broken down to its parts, a language hollowed out. The systems around us function in self-reinforcing loops: when you isolate their images and words, very little of substance is left.
New media exhibitions like these offer diverse views on how daily life has, in a world where most interactions are now digital, been rendered and rephrased in images. But two painting shows made me reflect on how art can make the world around us seem worth our attention, and how this reaffirms the belief that image-making matters. At Cob Gallery, Jamiu Agboke’s atmospheric landscape paintings on small copper or aluminum supports—around the size of a cigarette packet or a paperback—look like Whistler paintings or (because of his sgraffito technique) like a printmaking plate. These shimmering images depend only on material, scale, and the visibility of process for their power. And at Timothy Taylor, Jiab Prachakul’s paintings capture the artist’s day-to-day: sitting at a piano next to her daughter; a friend reading in an armchair; a woman lying by a river. They insist on their painterliness, they are quotidian and “small” in subject (if not in size) and they take an interest in other people, their presence, their experiences. This curiosity about the world around us, and a desire to portray it, provides one form of meaning that is fixed.
