London Summer Debrief
A very close look at Vik Muniz’s show Brushstrokes at Ben Brown Fine Arts, June 2025.
It’s the summer of 2025 and a short but sweet trip to London, the primary occasion being the Queen’s Club Championship Final, was an opportunity to conduct a long overdue vibecheck after years of talk about how thanks to Brexit’s bureaucratic hangover more collectors and galleries are shifting base, with Paris in particular stealing its thunder.
Despite showy headlines, the auction market has been a little skittish. Global sales dipped 12% last year, and London’s art trade is feeling the pinch of Brexit-era red tape. The city is pivoting—smaller transactions, warmer relationships with emerging collectors. Overall though, there was, as to be expected, no shortage of spectacular museum and gallery programming. And while this is no sole indicator for a healthy art market, it does demonstrate that things haven’t gone stale after all, even with Paris having become more sleek, sexy, and strategically competitive after decades of cultivating a reputation of being sleepy and not much else. It’s not a takeover—it’s a flirtation with consequences.
As for the art itself, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is still going strong (June 17–Aug 17), now in its 256th year—and looking younger than ever. The theme, Dialogues, brings together 1,700 works across social, ecological, and political divides. Meanwhile at the Hayward Gallery, Yoshitomo Nara’s first major UK retrospective (June 10–Aug 31) serves up angsty anime-eyed figures and punkish nostalgia. At Tate Britain, a double bill sees Edward Burra paired with Ithell Colquhoun (June 13–Oct 19). Burra’s surreal street scenes meet Colquhoun’s esoteric dreamscapes. It’s like a Tarot reading in a jazz bar.
The quiet knockout however can be found at The Estorick Collection which presents the first ever institutional UK exhibition dedicated to Claudio Parmiggiani, featuring works spanning across five decades. A visual elegy that explored absence and silence, memory and the invisible, through poetic gestures – the perfect cool reprieve from the heat and the weekend’s most affecting show.
As for galleries, a number of shows stood out: Ragna Bley’s Move Baby, Move at Pilar Corrias is a vibrant, woozy dream of an exhibition. Bley’s paintings feel like emotional weather systems—liquid, luminous and filled with movement. Equally memorable is Vik Muniz’s Brushstrokes at Ben Brown Fine Arts, where the artist, in what can be described as highly experimental, reimagines motifs from masterpieces of late 19th and early 20th century painters - who rejected academic rigidity in favour of perceptual immediacy - through clever meticulous puzzles constructed from photographed swaths of painted colour. Pace Gallery showcases Emily Kam Kngwarray’s artistic evolution in My Country in a stunning display of both early and mature works. At Flowers Gallery Liza Giles balances spontaneity and structure in layered works that seem to be mid-metamorphosis. Giles’s abstract work sits between painting and collage, perhaps even textile art.
Aside from these personal favourites, honourable mentions include Waddington Custot’s presentation of 12 AI generative works by Bernar Venet in When Steel Dreams of Code, adding to the artist’s continued investigation into systems of disorder. Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s Hauser & Wirth show glowed with emotion through ceramic works, a mural and sound installations, while Ugo Rondinone's rainbow-fluorescent Sadie Coles takeover felt overwhelming in every sense of the word. Rudolf Stingel at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill offered lush yet somewhat aloof beauty in a vibrant gold and green palette with his 2024 series Vineyard Paintings. Andrea Francolino’s Contemplatio at Mazzoleni is compact and thoughtful while Jimmy Robert’s The Erotics of Passage at Thomas Dane gives us fragile memory-objects that teeter between presence and loss.
Summer is also the time of group shows. But that doesn’t have to be an indictment. Ordovas offered up a concentrated ensemble of Alexander Calder, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Ana Mendieta, Henry Moore, Andy Warhol, Barbara Hepworth and Rachel Whiteread in Sculpted in an impactful exploration of negative space. Technically not part of a group show, works by Santiago Parra were a clear standout at JD Malat. The Columbian artist’s calligraphic explosions with a touch of Shiraga or even Hermann Nitsch are gestural and immediate. A high-octane love letter to London and its artists, past and present, can be seen at Saatchi Yates, where Benjamin Spiers, Frank Auerbach, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Paula Rego among many others come together in a visual mixtape named Once Upon a Time in London while Nahmad Projects on a smaller scale presented works by Braque, Calder, Kandinsky, Gris, Dufy, Dubuffet, Miro and Picasso in visual symphonies, a meditation on visual art and music.