Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

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Julie Mehretu, SEXTANT (Installation View), via White Cube

Moving through a range of historical and aesthetic modes of exploration for her most recent exhibition at White Cube in London, artist Julie Mehretu has offered a new fold in an already complex and multilayered body of work.  Her new exhibition, which opened just this past month, brings together a diverse and challenging arrangement of pieces that sees the artist mining contemporary image archives and newspaper headlines for her grounding material, a mode that moves beyond her prior practice and into new ground.  (more…)

Haim Steinbach, Untitled (fins, dolphin, seahorse) (2017). All images via White Cube Gallery.

Now through January 20th, 2018, White Cube is presenting jaws, a series of new works by Haim Steinbach at Mason’s Yard, featuring a new series of shelf works and the major installation Design #15–Design for a Yogurt Bar, first conceived in 1981 and reconfigured for the gallery space. Centered around ideas of leisure and health, Steinbach’s works in the show draw on cultural models from the 1970s and 1980s to reveal novel and unexpected meanings through juxtaposition.

Haim Steinbach, starbucksroast (2017)

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Ibrahim Mahama, Non-Orientable Nkansa (2017), via White Cube

Since his step onto the world stage at the 2015 Venice Biennale, artist Ibrahim Mahama has garnered impressive critical attention for his use of reclaimed jute sacks and other cast-off materials.  Drawing on the intersections of capitalist exchange, material decay, and commercial detritus, Mahama’s work uses structure and use as indicators of failed and fluctuating economic systems.  This practice takes on new elements and variations in the artist’s current exhibition at White Cube in London, his first solo exhibition in the UK, and a powerful introduction to the artist’s attentive, challenging body of work.

Ibrahim Mahama, Issaka Tob (2016), via White Cube

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Anselm Kiefer, Walhalla (1992 – 2016), via White Cube

Walhalla, Anselm Kiefer’s latest exhibition at White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey, is a dark, thrilling, and sinister rendering of war and destruction. The show’s title, drawn from Norse mythology, and referring to the final resting place of slain heroes as they were received by King Odin, is scribbled in charcoal above the entrance. “Walhalla” or “final place of rest” is also the title of a neoclassical hall commissioned by Bavaria’s King Ludwig I in 1842, built to honor men of great repute.  Kiefer, for his part, honors not just historical figures, but found objects in tandem, marrying unreality with the show’s surreal juxtapositions: a bed sinks under the weight of a winged boulder; a lightening bolt strikes a bullet-hold wheelchair; a spiral staircase, adorned with rusted dresses, leads to an ambiguous destination.  Notions of mythology and reality are interwoven to provide an intriguing, albeit challenging, spectacle to behold. (more…)

Raqib Shaw, Self Portrait in the Study at Peckham (After Vincenzo Catena) Kashmir Version (2015-2016), via White Cube

Raqib Shaw’s work is flush with context, canvases as densely layered with paint as they are with intersections of religious, historical and personal signifiers, drawing on the sprawling figurative techniques of Renaissance reliefs, decorative arts, and portraiture in quick succession.  His are paintings investigating the techniques and histories of these early Western works, while drawing on his own personal experiences to drive and embellish their original iconographies.  Shaw brings a new body of these works in sculpture and painting to White Cube’s Bermondsey location this month, continuing his investigation of 15th, 16th, and 17th Century art through the lens of his own life. (more…)

Liu Wentao, Untitled (2015), via White Cube

Taking over the full two-floor layout of White Cube’s Mason’s Yard exhibition space, the gallery’s summer exhibition the world is yours, as well as ours explores the richly diverse and energetic forms of Chinese painterly abstraction, considering its format beyond facile classifications as a corollary to Western technique.  Delving into the cultural histories and forms of Chinese painting over the past centuries, White Cube presents the abstraction of China’s current crop of artists as a deeper engagement wth a range of practices between modernism and more traditional approaches to the painterly surface.  The show places Taoist thought at its base, exploring how the appreciation of abstract form in Chinese culture more broadly has left the door open for diverse experiences and engagements with the canvas in the modern era. (more…)

Marc Quinn is parting ways with White Cube Gallery after more than 20 years.  Quinn was the first artist Jay Jopling worked with at the gallery, and just recently closed an exhibition late last year with the space.  “We are not representing him anymore,” says a gallery spokeswoman.  “We wish him every continued success with his future projects.” (more…)

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture (描法) No. 15-76 (1976) photo courtesy White Cube (George Darrell)

Considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, White Cube’s Mason’s Yard is currently presenting the work of Park Seo-Bo in his first solo show in the UK.  Best known for his Ecriture series of paintings, which he began in the late 1960s, the artist’s work in the series has allowed for his body, mind and creative process to merge together to form works that fully breathe out into space and time.  This exhibition traces the origins of these works, featuring 16 paintings made between 1967–81. (more…)

Gilbert & George
, THE BANNERS
 (Installation View), 9x9x9, White Cube Bermondsey
 © Gilbert & George. Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

THE BANNERS is the title of Gilbert & George’s ongoing exhibition at White Cube’s Bermondsey location, following the eminent duo’s larger scale installment Scapegoating Pictures for London in 2014. Resuming their sturdily rebellious stand against anything corporate or organizational, this current exhibition, akin to their previous one, appropriates the vocal language of political outrage and public protests that have been normalized and spread widely by the media.  As its self-explanatory title dictates, the exhibition includes thirty banners bearing ten different slogans and each repeating on three different white papers. (more…)

Both Almine Rech and White Cube Gallery are planning on opening New York outposts, the Art News reports.  Almine Rech is eyeing a “project space” proposal on the Upper East Side, while White Cube is still looking for space. (more…)

Artist Gary Hume is parting ways with White Cube Gallery, the Art Newspaper reports, partially due to the artist’s increasingly limited time spent in the UK.  As [he] is spending more time working in the US, by mutual agreement, he will no longer be represented by [us],” says a White Cube spokeswoman, who referred to the relationship between Hume and White Cube as “close and extremely positive.” (more…)

Gilbert and George are profiled in The Guardian this week, as the pair open a new show of works at White Cube, featuring cryptically inscribed banner works with texts like “Fuck the Planet,” which the artist’s argue carry parallel meanings.  “We need to just leave nature alone,” says George. “Human beings should only be in the city because it makes them freer and more tolerant than the ones isolated on top of the mountain.”  Gilbert agrees: “It’s the same as the love of God, who is just another dictator.” (more…)

Robert Irwin, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (Installation View), via White Cube

White Cube Bermondsey is currently playing home to a slight, albeit impressive exhibition by Robert Irwin, taking the artist’s interest in environmental sculpture, space and light to arguably its most minimal conclusions.  Taking up two rooms at the London Gallery, the exhibition continues Irwin’s exploration of objects in space, and their relationships to the site in which they reside. (more…)

Marc Quinn, The Toxic Sublime – The Toxic Sublime – 7&3Y6″>;X[:0#’y (2015), via White Cube

Artist Marc Quinn returns to his beloved shoreline for a new exhibition of works at White Cube this month, a continuation of the artist’s ongoing interest with the motion and resulting detritus that defines patterns of water, flow, and humanity’s relationships with these fluid forces. (more…)

Christian Marclay, Actions: Smak Squish Splsh (No 2) (2013), all images via White Cube

In his most recent  solo exhibition at the White Cube Bermondsey space, Christian Marclay presents a number of new works exploring the connection between image and sound, performance and artifact. From static onomatopoeias screen printed on canvas, to words racing around a video projection, to live performances within the gallery, Marclay explores the role of sound in art from numerous perspectives and forms, particularly in how they translate from one medium to the next. (more…)

Jake & Dinos Chapman, The Sum of All Evil (Installation View), courtesy White Cube Hong Kong

Currently at Hong Kong’s White Cube, British artists Jake & Dinos Chapman are exhibited The Sum of All Evil, the artists’ first in China, including a group of lurid, bizarre dioramas alongside their familiar series of “reworked paintings.”

Jake & Dinos Chapman, One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved (that it should come to this…) (2010), via White Cube

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Preview
Chuck Close, Prints: Process and Collaboration (Installation View), via White Cube

As part of a global tour featuring Chuck Close’s graphic works, curated by the Parrish Art Museum, USA, are currently on view at the White Cube Bermondsey South Galleries in London. Featuring a particular focus on Close’s prints, the exhibition brings a series of meticulously time-consuming works by the artist to light that stand strongly alongside his better-known, large-scale paintings.

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Elad Lassry, Russian Blue (2012), via White Cube

Transforming White Cube Gallery’s Hong Kong space into an an erratic mix of color and space, Elad Lassry has created a paradoxical challenge to viewer’s 2^nd and 3^rd dimensional perceptions.  Framed cats with piercing aquamarine eyes dot the room, gazing out at toys guarded by a luminous pink shielding. In another frame, viewers are presented with a tantalizing pair of raw steaks — the blood, emphasized by the disturbingly deep red background, but withheld from reach by its frame. Almost all the images observed in the gallery however, are flat: 2D photographs which are given depth only by the prisons they are situated in.

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Antony Gormley, Installation View (2012), Courtesy of the White Cube Gallery

With scatterings of futuristic beings juxtaposed against white walls walls and the faded grey floor of  White Cube’s Bermondsey space is Antony Gormley’s new exhibition, Model. Darkened figures lurk in the shadows, emerging from the concrete; domineering inhabitants shun away the seemingly unwelcome spectators. Occupying the South Gallery is the massive work, itself entitled Model, which allows visitors to walk into its complete darkness and allow anything to happen.

Antony Gormley, Model (2012), Courtesy of the White Cube Gallery

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Yayoi Kusama is reportedly leaving Gagosian Gallery, reports the ArtNewspaper. Damien Hirst also reportedly broke off his representation of 17 years as well this week. David Zwirner recently announced plans to host a Jeff Koons exhibition a long standing artist of Gagosian. Koons and Kusama currently have shows up at Gagosian locations (Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, respectively). Kusama is represented in London by Victoria Miro.  Hirst is represented in London by White Cube.
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A massive Antony Gormley sculpture, his largest to date, will go on view at White Cube next week. It is so enormous that visitors enter through one of the sculpture’s feet.  It is a direct response to the space afforded by White Cube’s South Galleries at Bermondsey.  (more…)

As White Cube leaves London’s Hoxton Square, the BBC reports on the history – and future – of the neighborhood. When art dealer Jay Jopling opened White Cube in 2000, the neighborhood of Shoreditch transformed into an expensive art and media center, now many galleries are leaving East London with rising prices.
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Theaster Gates – Raising Goliath (2012), courtesy White Cube Gallery

The work of Theaster Gates addresses social engagement using shared images of American life as a way to challenge cultural norms and to subvert singular readings of American history.  White Cube Bermondsey is hosting a major installation by the Chicago-based artist, entitled “My Labor is My Protest.”  Blending the cultural, social and personal, the show is a bold statement on the roles of identity and meaning in the construction of history and art history.

Theaster Gates – My Labor Is My Protest (Installation View) (2012), courtesy White Cube Gallery (more…)