London Gallery Weekend: A Snapshot of some favourite shows
For 72 hours, London’s art scene became one vast, twitching organism. From Mayfair’s white spaces to Peckham’s railway arches dripping with condensation, every gallery door swung open in ragged synchrony. This wasn’t just an open house – it was the city taking its pulse.
Nico Kos Earle stalked these spaces with a critic’s eye and a flâneur’s instincts. What emerged wasn’t a coherent narrative, but something better – London’s art world caught mid-gesture, makeup smudged, arguing with itself about the meaning of life while the bar ran dry. The real exhibition was the city itself.
If you are anywhere near Cadogan Gallery in Knightsbridge, be sure to see the museum-level show ‘Rare Earth’ by master painter Deborah Tarr. A selection of small and medium-sized oil paintings in rich, earthy tones, set in found or antique frames, is balanced with three large-scale paintings. Redolent of the purity and non-geometric abstraction of the Tachiste painters in post-1945 Paris, particularly Nicolas de Staël, or the Abstract Expressionists of post-war America, Tarr’s inimitable blend of abstraction and figuration is less about personal expression and more like a meditation on the essential character of the place. We can see that Tarr spends time in wide open spaces or near the water (in Cornwall); like the sea-worn shapes found on coastal verges, we simultaneously perceive a presence – rocks are resolutely there – and their dissolution.
Painting scenes through the slippage of memory (while also marking the passage of time with each considered stroke), her works somehow capture that mesmerising space between what is perceived and what is felt – they are sensational. In studied, painterly gestures, she draws from elemental forces— seasonal weather patterns, lunar cycles, and the endless motion of the sea – in an interplay of figuration and abstraction. Through this, she delves into the nitty-gritty character of a scene, distilling landscape to line and shape, and offers us glimpses of the sublime (in the true sense of being in awe of nature). We swing from the hefty horizontals in ‘The Archaic Landscape’ to the lightness of being in ‘Detachment’. For this, she reflects the oppositional forces of the natural world: turbulent and still, powerful and fragile, night and day. We see forms balanced with deliberate brushstrokes and dynamic compositions, and find harmony in her earthy, harmonious palette. We feel anchored by these paintings – as the elegant press release states: “Her compositions possess a quiet gravity; organic forms appear at once essential and timeless, imbued with a quiet, restorative force.” To me, Tarr’s paintings are like hymns – unforgettable, ecstatic melodies that live in their own time and offer moments of transcendence.
