LONDON ART DISPATCH JULY 2025
This month, London’s galleries are alive with exhibitions that explore material transformation, chromatic language, and the resilience of cultural memory. From Anselm Kiefer’s meditations on Van Gogh to Megan Rooney’s luminous abstractions, these four shows offer a glimpse into the ways artists sustain and reinvent tradition through experimentation and feeling.
Anselm Kiefer, Mason’s Yard
Artist: Anselm Kiefer
Gallery: White Cube Mason’s Yard
Dates: 25 June to 16 August 2025
Link: White Cube
In his exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Anselm Kiefer draws a powerful line between past and present by revisiting the landscapes of Vincent van Gogh. Kiefer’s layered canvases evoke fields and skies not as places of simple beauty but as repositories of myth and memory. His sunflower paintings, rendered in scorched earth tones and ashen hues, echo William Blake’s poetry and classical mythology, capturing the tension between endurance and decay. Alongside monumental works in oil and mixed media, Kiefer presents toned silver gelatin photographs that transform familiar motifs into spectral forms. The installation Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder, a suspended sunflower sculpture referencing Goethe’s Faust, anchors the show’s exploration of transience and regeneration. Each work underscores Kiefer’s belief that landscapes hold the imprints of time and human experience, inviting viewers to consider how history shapes perception.
Michaela Yearwood-Dan, No Time for Despair
Artist: Michaela Yearwood-Dan
Gallery: Hauser & Wirth London
Dates: 14 May to 2 August 2025
Link: Hauser & Wirth
In her debut exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Michaela Yearwood-Dan transforms the gallery into a vibrant space of celebration and reflection. No Time for Despair brings together large-scale paintings, ceramic sculptures, and site-specific installations infused with botanical motifs and diaristic texts. Yearwood-Dan draws on themes of Blackness, queerness, and collective healing, creating works that are lush with color, texture, and symbolic materials. Glitter, sequins, and ceramic petals appear alongside painted surfaces that evoke gardens in perpetual bloom. A monumental eleven-meter panelled landscape anchors the exhibition, complemented by intimate “B-Sides” paintings and an immersive sound piece composed with Alex Gruz. Her practice moves fluidly between disciplines, shaping environments that invite viewers to slow down, gather, and find joy in shared experiences.
Megan Rooney, Yellow Yellow Blue
Artist: Megan Rooney
Gallery: Thaddaeus Ropac London
Dates: 12 June to 2 August 2025
Link: Thaddaeus Ropac
Megan Rooney’s Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac presents a vivid exploration of abstraction as storytelling. Rooney’s new paintings, many created in her signature wingspan format, emerge from an intuitive process of layering, sanding, and reworking. While resolutely abstract, the canvases contain glimpses of ladders, trees, and dreamlike symbols that flicker just below the surface. Rooney describes color as both ally and adversary, a force that seduces and resists control. This chromatic tension becomes a metaphor for emotional states and the unpredictability of life itself. Completed during the transition from winter to spring, the works radiate a sense of renewal and flux. Accompanied by a new performance piece created in collaboration with choreographer Temitope Ajose and musician tyroneisaacstuart, the exhibition expands painting into a multisensory field of memory and possibility.
Josef Albers, The Sum of the PartS
Artist: Josef Albers
Gallery: Cristea Roberts Gallery
Dates: 12 June to 29 August 2025
Link: Cristea Roberts Gallery
Cristea Roberts Gallery presents The Sum of the Parts, the first exhibition dedicated exclusively to Josef Albers’ complete print portfolios. Spanning 14 years of work, the show highlights Albers’ mastery of color, line, and serial form. From the early Homage to the Square screenprints to the late Gray Instrumentation series, each portfolio demonstrates his precise investigations into visual perception. The exhibition includes Formulation: Articulation, a comprehensive suite that distills decades of inquiry into interactions between color and form. Albers’ prints, created through techniques like lithography and embossing, reflect his conviction that rigorous experimentation could unlock new ways of seeing. This gathering of rare complete portfolios offers a unique opportunity to experience the clarity and ambition of an artist who revolutionized abstraction.
