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Explore the contemporary art scene of London, which provide exhibitions crossing a number of media and themes and let us discover the possibilities of an abstract language of form. From Giorgio Griffa and Riccardo Guarnieri’s embrace of light and shadow, to Anthony McCall luminous vortices, we are invited to imagine through and beyond the real and imagined word, to think and re-think, to look and look again.

Sriwhana Spong — a hook but no fish   
Pump House Gallery
10 Jan – 1 Apr 2018

Throughout the Pump House Gallery’s four floors, the London-based New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong explores the Lingua Ignota, a secret language composed by 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. An exhibition which sensitively reflects on language, sound and the artists’s relationship with the natural world, spanning various media, discourses, and forms of deployment. Central to this research, on the first floor, a new 16mm film made of six parts, ‘a hook but no fish’ (2017), waves documentation of the landscape around the monastery where Von Bingen was enclosed. Paraffin wax and wet clay sculptures are presented on the ground floor, while surrounding the third floor balcony there is a series of yellow painting titled ‘Sigil’ (Rothschild’s mynah) #8-13. Spong’s narrative become an incantation, a rite, a dance exploring fluid relationships among fact and fiction, liminal spaces and imagined bodies.

Sriwhana Spong, a hook but no fish, 2017. Courtesy the artist, Michael Lett, Pump House Gallery. Photograph Damian Griffith

Giorgio Griffa — A continuous becoming
Camden Arts Centre
26 Jan – 8 Apr 2018

‘A continuous becoming’, the first first solo exhibition of Italian abstract painter Giorgio Griffa in the United Kingdom, fills the spaces of the Camden Arts Centre with grace. The exhibition, curated by Sophie Williamson, incorporates works from the 1960s through to today, representing a rare opportunity to discover the breadth of the artist’s practice, which is closely linked to the Arte Povera movement. The artist let the physical quality of works and materials define his rhythm, offering beautiful visual, musical, intermittent, compositions. Pastel colours and simple lines flow, seduce and lead us to the unpredictable, into something that can happen every time differently in the eye of the beholder.

Installation view of Giorgio Griffa – A Continuous Becoming, Camden Arts Centre, 2018. Photo Mark Blower

Lubaina Himid  — The Tenderness Only We Can See
Hollybush Gardens
17 Feb – 24 Mar 2018

The 2017 Turner prize winner presents her new body of work, consisting in paintings which move across canvas and wood, in drawers and on case, offering the possibility of being looked at in different ways. Himid’s work raises questions of personal and political identity, using a theatrical witty visual language to encourage conversation, argument and change. Music and its evocative power has a deep influence on her new series and here she has used four music related objects to navigate the exhibition space. ‘The Tenderness Only we Can See’, for instance, is a painting on a piano part; its picture surface is partitioned in three parts, at the centre a fish in yellow, brown and pink on a light yellow background is surrounded by baskets. ‘Chopin’s Heart’, on the other hand, is a piece of piano standing column-like, contrasts birds and patterns as if in a fabric sample book. Plants and animals, like patterns, traverse time and key into our register of recognition, assumption and place of cultural belonging.

Lubaina Himid — The Tenderness Only We Can See – Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd — Ze & Per
Sadie Coles HQ
22 Feb – 7 Apr 2018

In her third solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd presents a series of ten new ‘paintings’: large-scale, elaborate and characteristically exuberant compositions, encompassing paintings, performance, film and sculptures at the same time. This idea of fluidity – a freeing of the medium from its typical constraints or specifications – is embedded in the show’s title, which cites gender-neutral pronouns (Ze, Per) as symbols of inclusiveness and possibility, at once broader and more precise than traditional usages. In creating this colourful and theatrical works referring to the human form, Chetwynd creates fiction in which her works are cast as characters in an alternate reality that we are invited to enter.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Crazy Bat Lady 2018 photocopies, cardboard 292 x 168 x 1 cm / 115 x 66 1⁄8 x 3⁄8 in Copyright Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London Photography: Robert Glowacki

Riccardo Guarneri — Slowing time
Rosenfeld Porcini
23 Feb – 10 Apr 2018

The 84 year old Florentine Riccardo Guarneri, one of the very few Italian chosen by Christine Macel for her curated exhibition at last year’s Venice Biennale, is having his first solo exhibition in the UK at rosenfeld porcini. A selection of paintings spanning over 50 years of Guarneri’s practice, are juxtaposed with ‘Natura Morta’ by Giorgio Morandi and ‘Ironia’ by Fausto Melotti: three artists who, despite different practises, share a sensibility and a poetry which move towards abstraction. Weightless and light-touched compositions fill the gallery space, demonstrating the continuity of Guarnieri’ luminous vision, and evoking musical connections between colours and sounds, allowing infinite variations within the rhythm to be explored.

Riccardo Guarneri, Slowing time – Installation view at Rosenfeld Porcini – Courtesy Rosenfeld Porcini, London

Anthony McCall
Sprueth Magers
22 feb – 28 Mar 2018

On view in the lower-ground space are the solid light work ‘Meeting You Halfway II’ (2009), as well as a selection of large-scale silver gelatin photographs from the entirely new series ‘Smoke Screen’ (2017), by British born, New York based artist Anthony McCall. ‘Meeting You Halfway II’ consists in an immersive, sensory installation in which two identical partial ellipses of white light are emitted from a digital projector positioned at the end of a darkened room; occupying the the liminal spaces between sculpture, cinema and drawing, this three-dimensional object, calls for a mobile, participating spectator, and, like film, it takes time. We are asked to move around and through this light cone, to look at it from the inside and from the outside.

Anthony McCall, Meeting You Halfway (II), 2009 Installation view, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2009 © Anthony McCall Courtesy Sprüth Magers Photograph by Jason Wyche