Like a Beacon Against the Cold

4 October - 7 November, 2024

PV: 03 October, 6 - 8pm

Featuring: Jesse Akele, Anastazie Anderson, Thomas Cameron, David Gardner, Harriet Gillett, Lily Kemp, Gaia Ozwyn, Cece Phillips, and Ming Ying.

In London

every now and then

I get this craving

for my mother’s food

I leave art galleries

in search of plantains

saltfish/sweet potatoes

I need this link

I need this touch

of home

swinging my bag

like a beacon

against the cold

– Grace Nichols, ‘Like a Beacon’

Forthcoming this autumn at lbf contemporary, Like a beacon against the cold is an exhibition that focuses on how contemporary painters explore the complexities of identity and belonging within the dynamic backdrop of London, a city defined by its transience and rancour, as much as its pulsating creativity.

Inspired by Grace Nichol’s poem ‘Like a Beacon’, this exhibition acknowledges the truth that, throughout its history, the capital’s most dynamic painters have often been those who have chosen it––rather than inherited it––as their home. From the oppositional London Group of the 1910s to the School of London in the 1950s, when Jewish refugees Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud were joined by working-class northerner David Hockney and Lisbon-born feminist Paul Rego, the most prescient artistic observations of the city’s life have been seen through outsiders’ eyes.

— Matthew Holman

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