London's best contemporary art show is in Penge

Spectator

5 hours ago

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.
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 'Angel of 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 Cow!', 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 world's 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.