Curator at Large: Four artists to look out for this May

With hundreds of art exhibitions opening each month and thousands of artists making work, it can be easy to miss something outstanding. Here are four artists who our Curator recommends keeping an eye out for, and where you can see their work this month.

Adam Holmes-Davies

When I first met Adam Holmes-Davies in his studio last December, he showed me a work of his titled July Painting. It is a smallish picture in oil on linen, its surface depicting five yellow circles that variously disappear into and emerge from a colourful background of geometric shapes. Beneath its surface, the artist told me, are countless other images. In the years (and it did take years, I was told) that he spent on the work, many layers - some abstract, some figurative, some a combination of the two - were built up and scraped off or painted over. In July 2021, he stopped: it was finished. Its circles and shapes conceal the long list of experiments that sit beneath them in the same way that the work’s title flattens the time it took to create. Meeting Holmes-Davies, I learned about the doggedness and patience sometimes required to make, or perhaps find, the right image. I like to think that July Painting’s real subject is the many months and layers that came before July.

This exhibition, which is both a product and a record of years of Holmes-Davies’ correspondence with Luke Dowd, will feature paintings by both artists alongside a text that narrates their dialogue. Ultimately, it is an exhibition about making an exhibition, just as many of Adam’s paintings are about making paintings. 

Adam Holmes-Davies’ work is included in ‘Dear Luke, Dear Adam’, a group exhibition at Kingsgate Project Space (110-116 Kingsgate Road, London NW6 2JG) running from 5 May - 27 May.

Larry Achiampong

One of Larry Achiampong’s concerns is placing things where they should be, but aren’t already. Last year the artist was commissioned by Transport for London to transform Westminster station’s roundel sign with the colours of the pan-African flag - a motif that has come up in his work repeatedly. In an interview with Ekow Oliver, the artist explained; “the idea for the first Pan African flag I produced was simply to create a beacon, a beacon that, if I’m honest, as a young black person, I felt I’d never really seen before.”

For the artist’s second solo exhibition at Copperfield, he has constructed two more beacons. The first feels darkly ironic: in a series of overpainted religious posters, the heads of Christ and his followers are replaced by large black circles containing large red lips. Although these posters are ubiquitous in many African countries it is no surprise that, underneath Achiampong’s interventions, none of their characters are black. By replacing him with an archaic and racialised idea of blackness, the artist questions the suitability of a white Jesus, especially in countries that have been repressed by white western imperialism. The second beacon is more lighthearted: on show alongside the modified posters are video games, which viewers are invited to play. The artist argues that video games are too-often ignored as cultural artefacts; “the reality of their sophistication and cultural referencing is ignored by the rest of the creative sphere.” By bringing them into the gallery space - just as he brought the Pan African flag into Londoners’ commutes or black people into religious posters – Achiampong is erecting a beacon for people, media and ideas that have been wrongly excluded.

Larry Achiampong’s solo exhibition ‘And I saw a new heaven’ at Copperfield (6 Copperfield Street, London SE1 0EP) runs from 4 May - 17 June.

Brynley Odu Davies

If you have half an eye on the UK’s emerging art scene, you have probably already seen Brynley Odu Davies’ work. In the last three years the photographer has produced portraits of over 200 artists in their studios, many of which will be on show at his first solo exhibition with Studio West. One of few people documenting the practitioners who define and push forward our culture, Davies’ work is important and interesting now, and will only become more so as time goes on. When I met the photographer earlier this year we spoke about the importance of  recording the present moment which, as it recedes into the past, will inevitably disappear from both collective and individual memory if it goes undocumented. We spoke about Simon Wheatley, a photographer who spent much of the early 2000s taking portraits of grime MC’s. Years later, many of the people he photographed are household names and the scene that he documented in its infancy has grown into a global phenomenon.

Not all of the artists photographed by Davies will end up being stars. Some will – some already are – and Davies’ work allows us to see how their journey started. Some will move on to other things, leaving the art world behind them. What’s important, though, is that – thanks to photographer like Davies – this moment in time won’t disappear.

Brynley Odu Davies’ solo exhibition ‘Artist Portraits’ at Studio West (Unit 1, 216 Kensington Park Road, London  W11 1NR) runs from 5 May - 31 May.

Leila Al-Yousuf

‘I’m always responsive to my surroundings,’ says Leila Al-Yousuf in the text for her upcoming solo exhibition at indigo + madder. This might sound like an obvious and innocuous statement but, coming from an artist making work that most would describe as “abstract”, it is a resolute commitment to representing something real. To abstract means to withdraw, to separate, to detach; an abstract artwork is one whose contents don’t seek to represent the real world. Al-Yousuf does not fall into this category. She may borrow from the language of abstraction, but she does so in response to the world around her.

New vibration, one of the works on show, depicts variously coloured rings of gestural marks surrounding a nucleus-like shape at its centre. To me, it feels like a negotiation between order and chaos. Looking at Al-Yousuf’s work through the lens of representation, rather than abstraction, makes me wonder in both senses of the word. I wonder what the colourful, intuitive marks she makes in a variety of media are responding to, and I wonder at her ability to map her interpretation of her surroundings, whatever they are, without figuration - in what the exhibition’s text describes as “a language that is entirely her own”.

Leila Al-Yousuf’s solo exhibition ‘Waterscapes at indigo + madder’ (Kirkman House, 12 - 14 Whitfield Street, London W1T 2RF) runs from 5 May - 10 June.