Exhibitions that will Heal You
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us.
September 30, 2021
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
What is interesting about art is the fact that it is one of the few things in our existence that, as a creation, exists symbiotically. Art is both a vehicle of communication for its artist as much as it is for its viewer.
The act of viewing itself is meditative, but there is also an interrelational aspect to art where, as viewers, we hear the stories that both artist and art are telling us. We find comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our emotions, in our grief, our joy, love, anger, indignation, protest… The list goes on.
A recent visit to Tate Britain’s Rothko room to see his Seagram murals reminded me of this. I had gone explicitly to see these paintings on my own mini London pilgrimage. Stepping into the inky darkness of the room, where real-life ink hung vastly on canvases above me, I felt calm, at peace. After a long lockdown and a longer year, I’d been eager to find myself again lost in the comforting solace of a gallery and share thoughts with frames that speak back in their own language. I wasn’t alone.
Art as a means to healing isn’t new – earlier this year the French polymath, Pierre Lemarquis, published a book on this very subject, L’art Qui Guérit (in English Art That Heals) and at the turn of the summer, Brussels followed Montréal’s example set a few years ago by allowing doctors to prescribe patients visits to art museums as a means of counteracting pandemic-related mental health issues.
London could do well to follow this incentive and simultaneously help revive its arts and cultural sector that has been decimated through the pandemic, but in the interim there’s still a handful of exhibitions that are open or are opening that are worth a visit to ‘feel the feels’.
Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us at Unit London is living memory ‘in-canvassed’. Hagler takes us on his own journey over the past 18 months, where we witness fires, birth, the ordinary, and the extraordinary all within his works. As he thinks and experiences, he paints, assembles, and collates. Forced, as we all were, to be in the present, confined to the blending of days into months into a year and a half of a pandemic.
Karachi-based artist Rabia Farooqui shows us delicately the intrinsic power dynamics of human relationships in her first solo exhibition, Two Adults And An Attachment, at Kristin Hjellegjerde. Her show and the conversation she provokes is full of metaphor and allegory. Her paintings are practically Jungian in nature asking as many questions as one is willing – or able – to answer.
Having spoken of present and past, we look to Thursday’s opening of Rachel Howard’s You Have A New Memory at Simon Lee. Howard, a master of paint manipulation, looks to challenge what is real in perception and what is not. For the artist herself “the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.” And nor are we, we are reminded.
You can visit Hagler at Unit London until 4th October; Rabia Farooqui is on until 9th October at Kristin Hjellegjerde Wandsworth; whilst Rachel Howard opens on 1st October and will be on view until 14th November at Simon Lee.
