Exploring London’s Best Contemporary Art Galleries | Part 1 – Marylebone & Mayfair

Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel. I'm still in London. If you haven't seen my video from Freeze London yet, I will leave that linked above and below. You can always watch these in any order but in this video we're going to see a handful of gallery shows starting in Marleybone at two different Lisan Gallery locations. I'll also be writing more detailed posts about some of the exhibits I've seen on my sub stack so if you haven't subscribed to that make sure that you do so you don't miss anything. I will also leave a link for that in the description box as well. Our first stop is this Hugh Hayden show which I'm so excited for. I've been a fan of his work for a long time. If you're not familiar with Hugh Hayden, he is an American Brooklyn artist known for transforming familiar domestic objects like furniture or cooking tools into these surreal thorn-covered sculptures and they explore themes of identity, class, race, and the complexity of the American dream. His work often examines how personal and cultural histories intertwine through materials like wood and he carves and manipulates to reveal both beauty and tension. The exhibit is titled Humanity which is of course is a play on the word humanity and has named Hugh. This is his seventh show with the gallery and it explores ideas of community, belonging, and faith by transforming these everyday cultural symbols into these powerful sculptures. All of the works are made from trees through processes like carving and laminating and these new works introduce painted surfaces as a new important direction in his practice. This piece is a nod to English tailoring as well as a symbol of how status can become a source of discomfort or control. This room features a series of works that reimagine the American flag transforming it into a symbol of both pride and unease. In one, 50 wooden cigarettes replace the stars suggesting a nation under strain. In another, a racer scatter across the surface as if erasing history itself. This one is titled Medusa and it features these carved rattlesnakes where the stars once were. It turns the flag into a living emblem of myth and menace. Together all of these works blur the line between patriotism and critique revealing how identity, whether national or personal, is continually rewritten through conflict, erasure, and resistance. This room features one of the largest works in the show titled Humanity is the Last Supper and it's this long table surrounded by flames and Hayden uses the dining table, a place of family, ritual, and tension to explore themes of communion and exclusion while the flames recall both religious imagery and art history. You can see on the wall that nearby are 13 cast bronze skillets embedded with African masks extending the scene and they're transforming the idea of the melting pot into a portrait of Jesus and his disciples. So together these works reflect on how connection, whether spiritual, social, or cultural, depends on who is invited to the table and under what terms. Each piece just carries so much weight, there's so much symbolism in this show, so much to unpack, and that's what I really love about Hugh's work. I'm now going to head right around the corner to the second Lisan Gallery space in Marleybone to see an exhibit of works by Ding Yi who is a Shanghai-based artist known for his abstract paintings composed of repeated cross plus and x patterns, a visual language that he began developing in the late 1980s. His works explore precision, rhythm, and the tension between order and emotion reflecting China's rapid urbanization and the grid-like logic of modern life. The show is titled The Road to Heaven and it features a series of works that are inspired by the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan in southwestern China. It all began with a 2022 exhibit that Li had in Tibet. In 2024, after three research trips to Yunnan and in-depth conversations with scholars and Dunba priests, Ding Yi immersed himself in the Dunba religion, an ancient Naxi tradition blending animism and Tibetan Buddhism. Preserved through sacred pictographic manuscripts, its most striking text, The Road to Heaven, depicts the soul's symbolic passage from the earthly realm to the afterlife. This is obviously also where the title of the exhibit comes from. Drawing from the scroll's visual and spiritual resonance, Ding Yi created a series of works on coarse Dunba paper using acrylic and water-soluble colored pencil, and through his signature cross motif, he reinterprets the Dunba script as intricate fields of intersecting lines, merging its cosmology with his language of abstraction. Among the works is The Road to Heaven, 2024 B17, which is a four-panel composition that evokes the soul's journey through nine black mountains, the underworld, the natural world, and heaven. Another group of works that are featured in this exhibit that you can see here are these large relief paintings carved from basswood, featuring this tiered zigzag pattern that's meant to represent the Hongduan mountains of Yunnan. We're now going to head over to Mayfair to Gagosian Gallery to see a Christopher Wool show. However, we're going to stop for some lunch first. This is one of my favorite places in the area because it's super charming and right around the corner from Gagosian. This is an exhibit of works by Christopher Wool. There are over 50 works on paper, sculptures, and prints from the most recent period of his career. If you're not familiar with Christopher Wool, or you just want a little refresher, he's an American contemporary artist known for his bold text-based paintings and abstract works that explore language, gesture, and erasure. Emerging in the late 1980s New York art scene, he gained recognition for his stark black stenciled word paintings and then later for his process-driven abstractions where he layers silkscreen, paint, and turpentine. Across his practice, Wool examines repetition, distortion, and the tension between control and chaos, redefining what painting can be in a postmodern image-saturated world. Also a fun fact is that he's married to another highly celebrated contemporary artist, one of my favorites, Charlene von Hale. As you can see, this exhibit features works that continue to explore the limits of abstraction. So like many other artists I admire, like Jana Schroeder and Albert Olin, I like to call Wool a process-based artist at this stage in his career. And what I mean by that is he's an artist who emphasizes the act of making, so the physical and conceptual process, just as much or even more so than the finished artwork itself. So in this kind of practice, the visible traces of experimentation, so the repetition, the layering, the erasure, or chance become central to the meaning of the work. This process isn't hidden away or polished away, it's all part of what we experience as the viewer. So for example, in Christopher Wool's paintings, you can often see the build-up and removal of paint, silk-screened images that have been overlaid or wiped out, and the gestures of editing and revision. This transparency of method reflects how the artwork evolves through trial and change and accumulation, revealing the artist's decisions as an integral part of the piece. I also really love the sculptures in this show. They are copper-plated steel and bronze, and the lines just perfectly complement the gestural marks of the paintings. So even in his sculptures, Wool purposefully leaves details of the process visible, so you can see things like welded joints to really stress the handmade quality of these works. In general, I love it when artists who are typically painters dabble in sculpture as well. I think a great example of another artist doing this recently was Rashid Johnson's sculptures at his most recent show last year at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. I will leave that video linked above and below if you want to check that out. Our next stop is one of my favorite galleries in London, Gallery Thaddeus Ropac. It's just the most beautiful building, and we're here to see the exhibit of works by Eva Helena Páthé, who is a She's known for her large-scale, expressionistic works that explore the body, transformation, and moments of collapse or transition. Another thing that's unique about her work is how she displays her paintings. So you can see a few examples of that here. Instead of hanging them on the walls, she suspends both her large and small canvases on these floor-to-ceiling metal posts, and it creates this dynamic setup that viewers can walk through. She compares it to choreography because it really encourages people to move among the works and see how they connect. As she puts it, she creates them like, quote, an ensemble. They talk together. As we look closer, you can see Páthé's paintings capture the movement and chaos of crowds. So moments where figures blur and merge into one another, her dual-toned scenes unfold into these charged, dreamlike spaces that suggest nightclubs, theaters, or ritual gatherings. In them, you'll see the female body is very central, but not as an object of gaze, as a vessel for emotion and collective experience. There's also smoke and shadow that drift through her canvases, really adding to this layer of tension and mystery. Overall, in her works, she reimagines these grand, dynamic scenes through a contemporary lens, focusing on transformation, collapse, and renewal, where figures exist in constant flux between ecstasy and chaos. I don't know why—maybe it's her color palette—but her paintings mentally transport me to a party, like in Paris. They just remind me so much of Edouard Manet, especially the ones depicting Folies Berzères, this popular Parisian cabernet and musical. Our final stop of this video is going to be Max Hetzler Gallery to see Danielle McKinney's debut UK exhibition, featuring a series of new petite paintings and works on paper. So, if you're not familiar, McKinney is an American painter who's known for her intimate, cinematic depictions of Black women in moments of solitude and introspection. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, she portrays figures engaged in quiet rituals, so like smoking, reading, resting, and they're often illuminated by a single, moody light source. In contrast to the poise, stillness of her subjects, their surroundings are rendered through fluid and undiluted strokes of paint. So, influenced by artists such as Edward Vuillard and Walter Sickert, McKinney describes these spaces as pulsing with abstraction, quote, curtains swirl like storms, rugs dissolve into bushy tides, and walls hum with chromatic tension. This restless energy almost collides with the calm of her figures, creating this tension between movement and stillness. Not only is McKinney's palette richer and more saturated than in her earlier works, it's deeply symbolic. So, these heavy browns establish very introspective mood, while flashes of red, orange, yellow, and chartreuse break through like bursts of light, almost like a little glimmer of hope. To create this contemporary chiaroscuro, McKinney begins each work on an all-Black canvas. So, built from darkness, these passages of color evoke transformation and renewal, what she calls a, quote, fresh breath, a reminder that within the intimate spaces that we inhabit, there's always room for regeneration and growth. And that is all for this video, but stay tuned because in the next few videos we'll continue to see art exhibits in London. So, make sure that you're subscribed so that you don't miss anything, and I'll see you all in the next one.