A small east London show with an unreasonable ambition.
Seven painters, one rented industrial unit, no curator. The result is one of the more interesting group shows we have seen this year — and a useful argument about what a show is actually for.
The unit sits at the end of a long brick mews behind a railway arch in Hackney, in a part of east London that has, over the past decade, slowly been converted from light industry into something less easily named. It is, today, a small workshop on one side, a recording studio on the other, and — for ten days at the end of May — a contemporary painting exhibition in the middle. The paintings have been brought in by seven artists who, between them, have negotiated the space, the lighting, the labelling, the opening hours, and (most consequentially) the curatorial decisions.
The show has no curator. The artists have agreed, at the start of the planning process, that they would not appoint one. This is, on the face of it, unusual. Group shows of any seriousness — including artist-led ones — typically end up with a curator by default, often the one who has done the most work to make the show happen. The seven painters here have, instead, made every decision collectively, by a process of conversation that they all describe as having taken longer than the work itself.
What is on the walls
The work is varied. Two of the seven painters work in oil, three in acrylic, one in a mixture, and one — the most quietly extraordinary contributor to the show — in tempera on small wooden panels. The styles range from carefully observational figurative work to a kind of restrained abstraction that, in one case, has been the painter's sole project for the past six years. There is no apparent thematic logic to the selection. The painters have known each other, in most cases, for between five and fifteen years, and have selected each other primarily on the basis of mutual respect.
The hanging — and this is what makes the show interesting — is exceptional. The seven painters have spent, by their own account, three full days on the hanging alone. Every painting has been placed in relation to every other painting in the room. The hanging height varies, deliberately. The lighting has been individually adjusted for each painting. The labels, where they exist, are small and unobtrusive and have been written by the artist whose painting hangs nearest to them, not by a curator standing at a distance.
What this does to the work
The effect, when you walk into the room, is unmistakable. The show feels considered in a way that group shows of this scale almost never do. The work is given the room to breathe. The relationships between the paintings — relationships that, in most group shows, are accidental — have been thought about, in some cases over weeks of email exchanges between the artists. The result is closer to a small museum-quality presentation than to the kind of artist-led group show that the unit's address would suggest.
What surprised me most, on my first visit, was how little the lack of a unifying theme mattered. The conventional argument for a curator is that they impose a coherence on a group of disparate works that the works could not, on their own, supply. The painters here have refused that argument. The coherence of the show comes, instead, from the seriousness with which each painting has been placed in relation to the others — which is to say, from a different kind of curatorial labour, distributed across all seven contributors rather than concentrated in one.
The conventional argument for a curator is that they impose coherence on disparate works. The painters here have made a different argument — and the room is the proof.
What it costs to do this
The show is, by the standards of artist-led work in 2026 London, remarkably well-resourced. The unit's rent for the run, the lighting hire, the small printed publication that accompanies the show, the opening night drinks, and the hardware needed to install the work have together cost the artists somewhere in the region of three thousand pounds. They have split this seven ways. None of them, by their own account, expects to recoup it from sales.
This is not a complaint, on their part. They have decided, collectively, that the show is worth what it costs to put on. The decision is, in their view, no different from a decision to make a body of work over a period of months without knowing in advance whether it will sell. The show is, like the work, an act of practice.
What the visitor sees
I visited the show twice. The first visit was on the second day, when the artists were still around and the work was still settling into the room. The second was on the seventh day, when only one of the artists was present and the show had taken on, for me, a slightly different character. The second visit was, I think, the more useful one. The show had stopped feeling like a presentation and had started feeling like a place where I had come to look at paintings.
The paintings, on the second visit, were given to me by the room. The hanging — which on the first visit had felt admirable in the abstract — was, on the second visit, doing a kind of work I had not noticed. The relationships between the paintings had become legible in a way that they had not been on the first visit. The room was holding the work together.
This is, in my experience, a quality that very few group shows achieve. It is the quality that the conventional curatorial model, at its best, tries to produce — and that the curatorial model, at its routine, tends to flatten out. The painters here have produced it without a curator, by spending the time on the work that, in most cases, a curator would be paid to spend.
What I would say to a visitor
The show closed last week. There will not, the painters tell me, be a touring version. The work will return to the individual studios it came from. The exhibition existed, by design, only in this particular room, for these particular ten days. It will not be reproduced.
What I would say to a visitor who missed it is this: keep an eye on these seven painters. Most of them do not, in the conventional sense, have a public profile. None of them is represented by a major commercial gallery. They have collectively produced one of the most quietly considered exhibitions of the year, and they have done so by ignoring almost every standard of how a group show is supposed to be put together. The next time any of them puts on a show, I will be in the room.