A new series examines the strongest art exhibitions currently on display in commercial galleries offering free admission to visitors.
What makes Gabriel Orozco's fragmented vision so compelling?
Stepping into Gabriel Orozco's exhibition feels like regaining consciousness after a night you cannot recall, struggling to reconstruct what occurred. The Mexican conceptualist has constructed a space where everything appears fractured and disconnected, a historical narrative that resists coherent interpretation.
Applause greets visitors upon entry, yet the sound transforms into rainfall. Recognisable objects populate the space—vehicles, sports equipment, cigarettes—yet they confound expectation. Items hang suspended, fragmented, inverted. A vintage Citroën has been bisected and reassembled at a reduced scale, too compact and narrow. Ceiling fans rotate with toilet paper rolls affixed to their blades. Tree branches sprout cigarette butts. Children's playthings and games scatter throughout.
Many contemporary artists explore memory and temporal passage, but few capture its elusive quality as effectively as Orozco. The exhibition functions as a meditation on history stripped of canonical figures and significant dates, replaced instead by accumulated fragments of recollection.
The work occasionally veers toward self-congratulatory density and ephemerality, as though the artist cannot resist celebrating his own ingenuity. Yet this does not diminish its power—it remains unsettling, disorienting art that leaves viewers feeling they might forget essential information.
The exhibition runs at White Cube Bermondsey from 16 September to 8 November 2026, bringing together approximately 200 works spanning sculpture, painting, photography, assemblage and works on paper, curated by art historian Briony Fer. The show arrives as the artist marks the 10th anniversary of his permanent Orozco Garden commission at South London Gallery, realised in 2016, and follows his 2025 solo presentation at Museo Jumex in Mexico City.
How does Mary Ramsden push abstraction toward representation?
Few artists command colour with the intensity that Mary Ramsden demonstrates. The Yorkshire-based painter's expansive new abstracts immediately strike viewers with massive washes of pigment—one canvas combines neon pink and green dissolving into deep purple, another layers mauve and lilac across an expanse of blue. These compositions explode with chromatic intensity, abstraction pursued to its furthest reaches.
Extended viewing reveals further dimensions. Are those flower petals emerging from the paint? Daylight filtering through window slats? Each work oscillates between pure abstraction and recognisable imagery, suspended between still life and colourfield investigation.
Ramsden's earlier practice involved repetitive rendering of love hearts, as though abstracting entries from adolescent journals. She subsequently applied this approach to interior domestic scenes. Nature now infiltrates her vocabulary. The artist describes these works as investigations into consciousness and perception's boundaries. Yet what distinguishes this exhibition is its total, obsessive devotion to colour as subject and substance.
What does Martine Syms mean by "brand self"?
When asked to clarify Martine Syms' exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, a social media respondent offered the answer: "it's about Martine Syms." This proves surprisingly accurate. The Los Angeles-based artist explores brand identity—literally, through a ground-floor concept store selling Syms merchandise, publications and candles—and metaphorically, examining how individuals function as constructed brands: personalities assembled for consumption, composites of narrative, memory, commercial logic and cultural reference.
Two films occupy the upper galleries. The newer work depicts three figures at a late-night gathering discussing DMT and interdimensional experience; one participant begins hallucinating while companions lose consciousness. Reality and imagination collide without resolution.
The second film tracks a teenager fixated on an early 2000s television personality, an obsession that obliterates distinction between the actual person and their performed persona.
Neither film demonstrates exceptional performance or dialogue, yet both propel viewers onto the street with minds churning with unresolved questions. Syms inhabits a conceptual universe where boundaries between authentic identity, societal expectation and performed presentation remain perpetually unstable.
Why does Colin Self's pop art inspire dread rather than delight?
Rediscoveries of overlooked pop art innovators who appropriated commercial imagery decades ago occur with sufficient regularity to accumulate considerable value. Colin Self merits inclusion in this tradition.
Self distinguishes himself from generational peers through an overwhelming atmosphere of anxiety and menace. While contemporaries engaged consumerism and celebrity, Self confronted post-war devastation, nuclear threat during the Cold War era, and visceral terror. A grinning visage hangs by thread as a Nazi bomb approaches in one work; a snarling dog faces an array of missiles in another; Self constructs a warplane from nails and synthetic leopard fur; he fashions a male portrait from saws, blades, springs and implements. The work channels atomic horror within a newly mechanised society perpetually approaching self-destruction. These early pieces achieve brilliance—pop art with pleasure and colour supplanted by profound revulsion.
Self continues creating at 85. Recent landscape paintings depict his native East Anglia as desolate terrain scattered with abandoned caravans and bomb craters. While the newer works lack the earlier pieces' brilliance, they remain saturated with that foundational terror and dread.
How does Somaya Critchlow's latest work shift her erotic vision?
Critchlow's erotic portraiture has consistently carried an unmistakable atmosphere of menace. The young English painter's coquettish, 1970s soft-focus nudes engage viewers with aggressive, confrontational gazes, as though poised to deliver violence or strangulation. In this exhibition, however, that threat recedes.
The artist's intimate investigations continue their exploration of desire and vulnerability, yet the psychological edge that previously dominated her practice softens. Figures retain their commanding presence while the viewer no longer experiences the sensation of imminent physical danger. This evolution suggests Critchlow's ongoing negotiation with representation, power dynamics and the viewer's relationship to the depicted body.
