Each January, London galleries become a temporary network of borrowed rooms and alliances, as Condo returns to the city. What sets it apart from other city-wide gallery programmes is its spirit of exchange. Smaller galleries hosting similar-sized international galleries inside their own spaces, situating these encounters within a larger global art world ecosystem.
As a fifty-gallery show spread across twenty-three spaces, it can be easy for the many interchanging contexts to overwhelm. Attention becomes currency; the exhibitions that tend to linger are those that resist spectacle in favour of clarity and dialogue.
This year’s standout shows selected here exemplify Condo at its best: thoughtful exchanges that cut through the noise, and spaces that allow the artists and viewers the space to breathe.
Emalin hosting Peter Freeman Inc.
Emalin hosting Peter Freeman felt like a breath of fresh air in its bold, stripped-back approach. Bringing together two artists working in different media (Flavin in sculpture, Clegg in painting) from different periods (modern and contemporary), the exhibition reveals a shared sensibility beneath their surface contrasts.
Two rooms within the gallery are drenched in Flavin’s fluorescent light, works that are equally as compelling to inhabit as to glimpse from across the street at night. The warm red glow of Flavin’s Untitled (to V. Mayakovsky) 1 (1987) bleeds across to Clegg’s austere and life-like painting of a boy cinematically seen from above in Interior 20 (2025). In Clegg’s Exterior 4 (2025), a painting of light coming through the trees is mirrored in the trees seen through the window of the gallery space. The contrasting use of light, physically through Flavin’s installations (abstract, sensual) and representationally through Clegg’s painting (staged, cinematic, psychological) collapses in on itself.
A more mischievous dialogue emerges between the almost uncomfortably bright trio of upright tubes in Untitled (to Rainer) 2 (1987) and the suggested erection under a blanket in Clegg’s Interior 19 (2025). It is precisely this kind of tongue-in-cheek visual wit that keeps these roundups engaging. This is Condo’s ethos in action: exchange that sharpens both artists’ works.
Anna Clegg / Dan Flavin at Emalin, 118 ½ Shoreditch High Street, London, through 14 February 2026.
Hollybush Gardens hosting Gallerie Tschudi, Zuoz/Zurich
It can be easy to grow weary of references to Duchamp within contemporary art. His pervasive influence can feel overbearing and his provocations long since absorbed into the furniture of the art world. Bethan Huws, however, is an artist whose obsession is so encompassing that it draws you in. Huws’ crudely shaped boob fountain; clay breasts, spouting water in Fountains (2011) sit brazenly in the centre of the gallery for Birds, her joint exhibition with Andrew Büttner. The visible finger marks, left in the clay from their making, suggest fondling, collapsing reverence and irreverence in a single, deadpan gesture.
This exhibition revolves around Huws’ and Buttner’s shared and private obsessions – birds, Duchamp, moss, amongst other things. As is often the case with research-driven practices, the works are fully activated when the discourse around them reveals itself. Take, for example, Büttner’s series of moss photographs in Untitled (Moss) (2014). A compelling grid of photographs in their own right, which gain more resonance when you learn they are taken by ‘moss curator’ Ray Tangey and that moss is a ‘cryptogamous’ plant, meaning it possesses a hidden sexuality. Even moss is implicated in the exhibition’s quiet eroticism. Moments like this recur throughout the show. It’s worth spending time with this one.
Bethan Huws and Andrea Büttner: Birds at Hollybush Gardens, 1–2 Warner Yard, London, through 14 February 2026.
The Sunday Painter, C. Mae Bloom: Moments before seconds after
If I look around my living room, I am likely to find the material of C. Mae Bloom’s Moments before seconds after. Bobbins, batteries, mini USB cables, string, thumbtacks; what poet James Schuyler called the ‘Dreck’ of the everyday. Bloom has arranged this detritus into sculptural ‘constellations,’ spread out across a large white panel board that runs the length of the room, propped up on haphazardly placed trestles. Its effect is charming; like peering into a diorama or snow globe, you circle the table, drawn into the minutiae of each arrangement – assorted doilies in descending size, a Stonehenge of erasers, a ball of thumbtacks. Within the entropy of the material, Bloom prescribes value and meaning through the assembly of overlooked objects. The substantial materials list, laid out in block text, is itself something to behold.
C. Mae Bloom: Moments before seconds after at The Sunday Painter, 117-119 S Lambeth Rd, London, through 14 February 2026.
The Approach hosting Margot Samel, New York
One of the more understated yet equally impactful shows of Condo is Margot Samel’s intergenerational pairing of Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia, two artists from Philadelphia connected through friendship as opposed to formal similarity. Jia’s small, intricately detailed paintings surround Johnson’s diorama-like assemblages, which are imbued with the social fabric of early 2000s Philadelphia. Made over time with material found on his way to and from his work, the installations tangibly feel like physical memory deposits; pieces of broken signs, street photographs, graffiti.
Both nod to their heritage, though in markedly different registers. Peering through what appears to be a rooftop in Johnson’s Bad (2005-2010), you can see a small silhouette target – a nod to gun culture and the increased precarity to Black life. Jia’s paintings, on the other hand, operate on a more subtle psychological level. Books, drawings and near-mythic figures, such as Asian opera singers, her grandmother, populate her paintings, imbued with an interiority that’s less tangibly seen than more quietly felt.
Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia at The Approach Tavern, The Annexe, 1st Floor, 47 Approach Rd, Bethnal Green, London, through 21 February 2026.
Brunette Coleman hosting ZERO… Milan
This show is worth the trek across London and climb up the two flights of stairs for Hubert Duprat’s Tube de Tricopthère alone. Three tiny tubes sit in an acrylic box. Curious at first, they become majestic when you discover they were made by caddisflies, moth-like insects that build protective cases to pupate in. Ordinarily they gather stones, sand and leaves, binding them with silk; Duprat however supplied gold, pearls, rubies and diamonds. The result is a set of exquisitely intricate miniatures born from larvae yet elevated to precious objects. Paralleled with Paride Maria Calvia’s Blowing coat, pig hair balls strewn across the floor as the artist scattered them, makes for another body of painstakingly made works with distinctly unglamorous origins. What’s not to like when the abject becomes strangely beautiful?
Paride Maria Calvia, Hubert Duprat, Irene Fenara at Brunette Coleman, 42 Theobalds Rd, London, through 14 February.
