London’s best contemporary art show is in Penge
Plus: seductive Argentinian conceptualists, the disorienting comedy of Okiki Akinfe and why you should visit Darlington in September
DIGBY WARDE-ALDAM
If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you
might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its
periodic ‘moments: A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around
Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their
bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their
online presence is at best spectral: the most hyped of the bunch, a Smithfield
gallery called Ginny on Frederick, has a holding page in place of a website.
Still, I like a scene, and London Gallery Weekend, an annual June event,
presented a good opportunity to investigate. Niso gallery, on New Cavendish
Street, has put on a seductive showing of the Argentinian conceptualist
Martina Quesada (open until.28 June). A highly referential exhibition, it is
equal parts James Turrell and Lucio Fontana, the latter riffed on with a work
that sees his emblematic canvas-slash gesture stretched out and knotted into
the shape of a bellybutton.
The aforementioned Ginny on Frederick’s current number, a display of bizarre
paintings by Okiki Akinfe (open until 26 July), manifests like a comic strip as
imagined by some defective early AI platform and thence splurged on to
canvases. The Essex-born artist paints animals, signage and body parts
mutating into one another, at a disorienting remove suggestive of the viewer’s
perspective of a video game. If that description doesn’t sell it to you, the
deeply Estuary titles (‘She’s an Absolute Cow!’, for instance) might do the
trick. Otherwise, Gallery Weekend promised countless, no doubt fascinating
opportunities to see middling artists in conversation with art critics. But I
didn’t go to any of these. Instead, I went to Penge.
Penge is a suburb best known for being 1) the childhood home of Bill Wyman
and 2) a punchline beloved of 1970s BBC ‘comedians~ It is also fielding the
best contemporary art exhibition going in the capital, courtesy of Tension
Gallery (open until 29 June). Its subject is Mark Wallinger, and the reason for
his. appearance in SE20, I understand, is that after an unpleasant stint with
Swiss mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, he wanted to give as big a ‘fuck you to
Mayfair as possible. As well he might: Wallinger (b.1959) is about as
interesting an artist as you’ll encounter today, and it’s the blue-chip art world’s
loss. Since the 1980s, he has been addressing big subjects – class, religion,
memory and politics – with a lightness of touch that in the hands of a lesser
intellect might seem trite. Or worse: like something by Martin Parr.
Penge is fielding the best contemporary art exhibition going in the capital
Wallinger has, for instance: recreated the anti-war activist Brian Haw’s
Parliament Square protest encampment slap bang in the middle of Tate
Britain; bought a racehorse and rebaptised it ‘A Real Work of Art’; and stalked
a gallery opening dressed, for some reason, as a bear. Oh, and proposed a sadly
unrealised southern analogue to Antony Gormley’s ‘Angelo f the North’
a massive sculpture of a white horse that would have towered over the
Ebbsfleet Eurostar tracks. His latest is somehow his most Wallinger-y yet. A
split-screen TV broadcasts the first two bits of footage.ever recorded in space,
one by a Yankee astronaut, the other from a Soviet cosmo, who, we learn from
the press bumpf, created the first work of art made in space, a sketch of a
sunrise. The two are played simultaneously, to the strains of an aria from
Rameau’s Castor et Pollux – the early American space programme was called
‘Gemini’ – and while there’s not much inference to be made that you won’t
pick out yourself, the work is mesmerisingly beautiful.
‘She’s an Absolute Cowl: 2025, by Okiki Akinfe. Image: Ginny on Frederick
I used to go on international press trips on a weekly basis, but the gig ain’t
what it used to be and the furthest I got this month was Darlington – where,
in 1825, a Quaker cousin of mine, Edward Pease, met George Stephenson and
raised the capital to build the world’s first proper railway. I didn’t know this
until I went up to see the efforts commemorating the line’s bicentennial. I thus
have skin in the game, but on a limited budget, the local councils and English
Heritage have between them made a decent fist of this. The original line,
disused since 1876, will become a walking path interspersed by works of art. I
saw two, one of which, at Heighington, the worlds first passenger station, was
really good. Kate Jackson’s mural stretches over the fence of the unmanned
station, bearing the unmistakeable silhouette of an Intercity 125 and filled
with painterly references: the driver’s window has a very Mondrian corner,
while a numeral on one of the portholes pays homage to Charles Demuth’s ‘I
Saw the Figure 5 in Gold: It’s a restless interplay of circles and straight lines
evoking the decorative art of the Festival of Britain: nostalgic, sure, but falling
just the right side of twee. The anniversary falls in September, and you should
visit; I will
WRITTEN BY
Digby Warde-Aldam
First Published in The Spectator 19th June 2025
