LONDON ART DISPATCH JUNE 2025
This season, London’s galleries are brimming with exhibitions that challenge our sense of time, place, and perception. From installations that transform architecture into material to meditations on collective memory and ecological consciousness, these four shows invite visitors to reflect on what art can dismantle and what it can imagine anew.
Tadashi Kawamata, Demolition
Artist: Tadashi Kawamata
Gallery: Annely Juda Fine Art
Dates: 22 May to 5 July 2025
Link: Annely Juda Fine Art
To mark the gallery’s departure from its long-standing Dering Street space, Tadashi Kawamata has created a site-responsive environment that feels like a living archive. Demolition is constructed entirely from reclaimed materials salvaged during the gallery’s own partial deconstruction. Visitors are invited to step into an environment that resembles an exposed building site, where structural elements reveal decades of use and memory. Wall-based maquettes, some newly assembled during the exhibition, echo earlier projects and blend sculptural form with architectural fragment. Known for working with reclaimed wood and improvisational construction, Kawamata balances solidity with vulnerability, suggesting that spaces we inhabit are always provisional. The installation becomes both a farewell and a meditation on how material and history can be transformed into something contemplative.
Richard Hunt, Metamorphosis, A Retrospective
Artist: Richard Hunt
Gallery: White Cube Bermondsey
Dates: 25 April to 29 June 2025
Link: White Cube
White Cube presents the first major European retrospective of Richard Hunt, one of America’s most celebrated sculptors. Spanning more than sixty years, the exhibition traces Hunt’s evolution from early welded steel assemblages to monumental bronzes that pay tribute to the cultural and historical experiences of African Americans. Works such as Hero’s Head, inspired by the memory of Emmett Till, and Reaching Up, a soaring form evoking both trees and gestures of aspiration, illustrate how Hunt’s practice merges personal history with broader cultural narratives. Influenced by modernist pioneers and the rhythms of natural forms, his sculptures reflect a belief in the potential of material transformation. Installed throughout the Bermondsey galleries, these works highlight his persistent inquiry into the expressive power of line, volume, and movement.
Figure + Ground, Selected Film and Video Works
Artists: Group Exhibition
Gallery: Hauser & Wirth London
Dates: 6 June to 2 August 2025
Link: Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth transforms its North Gallery into an immersive screening room for Figure + Ground, an exhibition of single-channel film and video by 19 artists. The presentation ranges from pioneering experiments of the late 1960s to contemporary works that blur the boundary between representation and abstraction. The two rotating programs include pieces by Sonia Boyce, Rashid Johnson, Cindy Sherman, William Kentridge, and others, each exploring how figure-ground relationships shape perception and cultural narratives. The idea that context can redefine meaning recurs throughout, whether in Lorna Simpson’s atmospheric Cloudscape or Pipilotti Rist’s colorful inversions. Together, these works illustrate how the moving image can challenge what we see, what we overlook, and how the medium itself becomes part of the message.
Philippe Parreno, El Almendral
Artist: Philippe Parreno
Gallery: Pilar Corrias
Dates: 23 May to 28 June 2025
Link: Pilar Corrias
Philippe Parreno’s El Almendral offers a poetic encounter with a landscape that doubles as cinema. In the gallery, a continuous live stream from an almond grove in southern Spain unfolds across day and night, capturing environmental shifts and subtle changes in light. This project treats film production as an agricultural practice, where images are cultivated and harvested in tandem with natural cycles. Sustainable technologies, including solar panels and moisture-collecting nets, support the evolving site, which Parreno has given legal status as a self-owning entity. The exhibition also features selections from his Marquee series, glowing sculptural installations that reference the architecture of old cinema signage. El Almendral blurs the line between documentation and fiction, proposing that a landscape can be both witness and collaborator in the act of storytelling.
