Exhibitions
2000 Onwards
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Barry Flanagan
Process, Method and Myth 26–29 January 2023 Barry Flanagan (1941 – 2009), one of Britain’s most inventive and original sculptors, is spotlighted in a special exhibiton at artgenève 2023. A leading figure in a generation of influential... Read more -
ART SG
Booth BB05 11–15 January 2023 At this first edition of ART SG, Waddington Custot will show the breadth of its programme including contemporary sculpture and contemporary and modern painting. Represented artists include: March Avery, Fernando... Read more
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Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
Stand A6 29 November–3 December 2022 Jean Arp Hans Hartung Joseph Albers Robert Indiana John Baeder Landon Metz Tom Blackwell Jedd Novatt Peter Blake Beverly Pepper Robert Cottingham Gerhard Richter Jean Dubuffet Jean-Paul Riopelle Don Eddy... Read more -
M (Michael Chow) 周英華
Bridges 18 November 2022–28 January 2023 “Theatre is all about the moment. Every performance is different. It's the same with painting, a painting can take you anywhere and as an artist, you don’t try to control it. Even with an artist like Mondrian, inside his world of control there’s so much spontaneity.” Read more
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Frieze Masters 2022
Stand G1 12–16 October 2022 For Frieze Masters 2022, Waddington Custot exhibits iconic paintings by six artists working in France in the wake of the Second World War: Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff, Jean-Paul... Read more -
Bernar Venet
Hypotheses 28 September–12 November 2022 “Many people think that I have studied mathematics, but I am not a mathematician: I believe an artist’s real role is to question everything that constitutes the nature and definition of art. Putting mathematical language at the centre of my work allows me to introduce a subject to the artistic field that is neither abstract nor figurative: it is freed from those traditions.” Read more
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March Avery
In the Studio 6 July–17 September 2022 Bringing together over fifty years of work, this new exhibition introduces UK audiences to the richly coloured, enchanting compositions of painter March Avery (b. 1932, New York, New York), in her first solo show outside of the United States. Read more -
Masterpiece London 2022
30 June–6 July 2022 Find us at stand 407 for our inaugural participation in Masterpiece London this summer, with a presentation which features a special section of historic works by the legendary Britsh artist... Read more
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TEFAF Maastricht 2022
24–30 June 2022 In celebration of our return to Maastricht for Tefaf Maastricht 2022, Waddington Custot are presenting a selection of fine contemporary and modern works by artists for which the gallery is... Read more -
Peter Blake
Under Milk Wood, a play by Dylan Thomas 11 June–23 July 2022 A series of over 170 watercolours, collages and drawings by Sir Peter Blake illustrating Dylan Thomas's landmark 1953 ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, is to be exhibited by Waddington Custot this summer, in a new, dedicated exhibition space opposite the main gallery at 22 Cork Street, London. The series has never before been shown outside of Wales, and this exhibition debuts a number of new works shown for the first time, as Blake has continued to work on the series. Under Milk Wood will open as Blake celebrates his 90th birthday. Read more
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TEFAF New York 2022
5–10 May 2022 For TEFAF New York 2022, Waddington Custot presents a solo booth of paintings by the celebrated ‘enfant terrible’ of postwar French painting and vocal proponent of Art Brut, Jean Dubuffet... Read more -
Hans Hartung
Painter • Photographer 22 April–1 July 2022 While many are familiar with the abstract paintings of German-French artist Hans Hartung (b.1904, Leipzig, Germany; d.1989, Antibes, France), few know of their connection to his photography. In collaboration with the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, Waddington Custot presents Hans Hartung: Painter, Photographer, a museum-quality exhibition that illuminates the importance of photography to the development of the painter’s work. Today, approximately 30,000 photographic negatives are held by the Foundation, with those the artist printed organised chronologically and thematically in numerous albums, demonstrating the tremendous value he ascribed them. Nevertheless Hartung’s photographs – a vital yet rarely explored aspect of his practice – have never before been exhibited in London; this will be the first time that some have been publicly exhibited. Read more
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artgenève
salon d'art 3–6 March 2022 Waddington Custot are participating in artgenève for the first time this year. Visit our stand at A11 for works by: Jean Arp, Fernando Botero, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet, Barry... Read more -
DRIVE
North America and the Open Road 28 February–5 April 2022 From drive-ins and drive-throughs, to road trips on the open highway—the automobile is an essential part of American culture. Certain routes and journeys have become the stuff of legend, while... Read more
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Art Basel Miami Beach 2021
2–4 December 2021 Waddington Custot are participating in Art Basel Miami Beach 2021. Visit us on stand A06 for Photorealist paintings by: John Baeder, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann and... Read more -
Landon Metz: Love Songs
26 November 2021–26 January 2022 A rhythmic sequence of biomorphic forms seeping over raw canvas...immensely calming.' Financial Times Waddington Custot presents the first UK solo exhibition by New York-based contemporary artist Landon Metz (b.1985, Arizona,... Read more
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FIAC 2021
20–24 October 2021 Find us on booth D13 for modern masters and selected leading contemporary artists. Waddington Custot's stand at FIAC 2021 includes works by: César Antoni Clavé Nicolas de Staël Jean Dubuffet... Read more -
Converging Horizons
Etel Adnan, Sheila Hicks and Sophia Vari 19 October–6 November 2021 Waddington Custot is pleased to announce Converging Horizons, an exhibition in Paris hosted by Clavé Fine Art, recently redesigned as an exhibition space by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. Converging... Read more
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American Painting
Waddington Custot at Frieze Masters 13–17 October 2021 At Frieze Masters this year, Waddington Custot presents a selection of iconic paintings by artists working in the United States from the late 1960s and 1970s, including: John Baeder, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann and John Salt. The paintings come from a private collection that has taken over a decade to build. Read more -
Making It
Women and Abstract Sculpture 1 October–13 November 2021 Waddington Custot presents Making It, a group exhibition dedicated to a generation of pioneering women sculptors who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Taking an unexpected approach to their chosen media: fusing gold leaf with linen for instance, folding metal or hand-knotting rope, these artists challenged modernist conventions and expanded conceptions of the appropriate media and methods for sculpture. Artists in the exhibition include Olga de Amaral, Lynda Benglis, Françoise Grossen, Maren Hassinger, Barbara Levittoux-Świderska, Louise Nevelson, Beverly Pepper, Mildred Thompson and Sophia Vari. These artists are known for working on an ambitious scale, building upon the gallery’s focus on monumental sculpture. Read more
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Table Pieces
An intimate collection of sculptures 26 July–9 August 2021 Waddington Custot presents Table Pieces, a digital exhibition dedicated to an intimate collection of sculptural pieces by eight celebrated artists: Alma Allen, César, Barry Flanagan, Fausto Melotti, Joan Miró, Beverly Pepper, Pablo Reinoso and Antoni Tàpies.
While renowned sculptors often rise to prominence with large-scale – sometimes monumental – pieces, many also work on an altogether more human measure. This digital presentation includes a variety of intriguing small-scale sculptures, from pieces that deliberately engage with human proportions designed for domestic settings, to hand-made models and maquettes that respond to larger sculptures, often giving rise to new ones.
Many of the works have component parts such as handles, or curves and indentations, of which the size is recognisably intended to fit into the human hand or to create a dialogue with the body. These sculptures not only retain, but condense to great effect, the ambition, concept and scope of the artists’ larger scale work. Read more -
Peter Blake: Time Traveller
18 June–9 September 2021 Waddington Custot is pleased to present Peter Blake: Time Traveller, an exhibition dedicated to the groundbreaking exploration of collage by iconic British artist Peter Blake. This comprehensive survey show, which includes a number of important museum loans, investigates the fundamentals of Blake’s practice in collage over a career spanning seven decades, bringing together historic works and never-before-seen pieces. A new monograph, Peter Blake: Collage, which includes a foreword by Blake’s schoolfriend David Hockney, will be published by Thames & Hudson to coincide with the exhibition.
Peter Blake: Time Traveller charts the development of Blake’s approach to collage-making, beginning with his layering of subject matter in early painted compositions and experiments with collaged paper after encountering work by Kurt Schwitters in the 1950s. From here, the exhibition travels via Blake’s rise to prominence as the ‘Godfather of British Pop art’ to his current, self-proclaimed Late Period. From his found object constructions to his most recent digital print photo-collages, Blake has broadened the scope of what collage can comprise and what it can communicate. Peter Blake: Time Traveller includes works from Blake’s Alphabet and Museum of Black and White series, as well as pieces made in homage to fellow artists Sonia Delaunay, Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg. Clowns, wrestlers and Icons are shown alongside work around souvenirs and holiday postcards.
The artist’s largest canvas work to date, Late Period: Battle, is seen on view for the first time. The piece, measuring 183.4 x 293.5 cm, was started by Blake in 1964 only to be abandoned and left unfinished until the artist turned to collage to complete the work in 2018. Read more
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Frieze Viewing Room
Fabienne Verdier 5–14 May 2021 On the occasion of Frieze New York 2021, Waddington Custot celebrates the work of French abstract painter Fabienne Verdier. The solo presentation focuses on Verdier’s expression of the way in which sound energy, created by vibrations, moves through substances, inspired by her experience as the first artist in residence at The Juilliard School, New York in 2014
During her residency, Fabienne would join the practice sessions of musicians and singers and attempt to capture the music she heard as a visible manifestation on the page, as she described: “I closed my eyes and I heard something and I got a totally new vision of what sound is. A new structure appeared in my brain: I discovered a new form, a new dynamism which was a real revolution in my painting.”
This idea was further developed the following year with ‘Vide Vibration’ part of a commission by the Roberts French Dictionary, in which Verdier considers silence as a kind of inhabited emptiness, preparing our mind to the relative movement of sound energy.
Also included in the Frieze New York presentation are large scale paintings in a restricted palette of just two colours, including the ‘Infra-Red’ series in blue and red. With this combination, Verdier makes reference to the edges of the light spectrum as perceived by the human eye, and the light which remains on the retina, still ‘seen’ when the eyes are closed. In this respect, Verdier was interested in the impact of light energy on our bodies, as compared to the effect of sound energy, and the continued effect of the vibrations of music once a piece of music is stopped.
In 2020, Verdier returned to the arias she had been inspired by at the Juilliard School to create the ‘Vortex’ series. For these large scale canvases, Verdier prepares the background over several weeks with: a single colour, worked into the surface. The single gestural motif is created with an immense brush, suspended from the ceiling of her studio by a thick chain. In the ‘Vortex’ paintings on view here, the gesture takes the form of a whirling helix, painted in response to the operatic scaling of sopranos and altos performing Mozart arias.
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Paul Feeley: Space Stands Still
12 April–6 June 2021 Waddington Custot is pleased to present Paul Feeley: Space Stands Still, the first solo exhibition of Feeley’s work in the UK for over 50 years. The exhibition shines a light on this significant but relatively overlooked artist who worked with Clement Greenberg and played a pivotal role in the careers of many seminal abstract artists, including Helen Frankenthaler.
This exhibition charts the development of Feeley’s abstraction over the course of his brief but prolific career, presenting pieces from the 1950s through to those created just before his untimely death in 1966 at the age of 55. Works by Feeley, including oil on canvas paintings and three-dimensional sculptures in wood, are shown in the UK for the first time. The works are characterised by Feeley’s distinctive approach to symmetry and pattern through curving shapes in vibrant colours. The central forms and repeated motifs, often in symmetrical clusters, are reminiscent of vertebrae and teeth, molecular structures or jacks.
Although often associated with Abstract Expressionism, Feeley broke with the movement in the 1940s. Speaking to Lawrence Alloway in 1964, the artist explained ‘I began to dwell on pyramids and things like that instead of on jungles of movement and action... The things I couldn’t forget in art, were things, which made no attempt to be exciting.’ And so Feeley’s work moved away from gestural abstraction and into ‘a quiescent art of stability, poise, and space’, as described by Douglas Dreishpoon in Imperfections by Chance (his 2015 essay on Feeley). This astute observation is echoed by Feeley’s comment that in his paintings ‘space stands still’. Read more
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Work on Paper
Chu Teh-Chun, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Fabienne Verdier and Zao Wou-Ki 25 February–18 March 2021 Waddington Custot presents ‘Work on Paper’. This online exhibition features paintings by five major figures associated with French art: Chu Teh-Chun, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Fabienne Verdier and Zao Wou-Ki. All engage with ideas of lyrical abstraction and Tachisme, movements that thrived in Paris in the mid-20th century. Their balanced and elegant compositions are charged with a mastery of gesture and quick execution. These artists were deeply inspired by nature, and the paintings are each a personal expression of the living world. Read more -
Defining Space
A group exhibition of 20th and 21st century artists 2 December 2020–20 February 2021 Defining Space explores the impact of negative space within the work of 20th and 21st century artists, demonstrating how line and drawing play a crucial role in mapping out imagined spatial configurations.
The works in this group presentation demonstrate the translation of drawing into the three-dimensional; towering monumental installations protrude from the walls, and curl up from floors, while the negative space of the picture plane is variously architecturally structured, or revealed through light and shade.
The exhibition includes works by Peter Blake, Enrico Castellani, Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport, Jean Dubuffet, Barry Flanagan, Peter Halley, Hans Hartung, Frank Stella and Bernar Venet among others.
One of Bernar Venet’s iconic Indeterminate Line sculptures, created in rolled steel, shows the French artist’s approach to conceptualising and configuring space.
Mgarap Bangke, a 2004 wall-based sculpture by Frank Stella, similarly towers in a tangle of industrial materials, which the artist has coerced into curving organic forms. Moulded sections of dark carbon fibre are supported by circular loops of unpainted stainless-steel tubing and geometric rails.
A new painting by Ian Davenport, titled Yellow and Purple (Double), is also displayed, portraying the artist's use of colour as a tool to delineate space through controlled movements of vibrant paint. Read more
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TEFAF Online New York 2020
Barry Flanagan’s 'Hells Bells' 1–4 November 2020 Waddington Custot participates in the inaugural edition of TEFAF Online, a new digital art fair initiative that allows galleries to present a single artwork.
A VIP preview runs online from 30–31 October, with the public opening dates from 1–4 November.
Waddington Custot has selected to show Barry Flanagan’s Hells Bells, one of the artist’s most celebrated renditions of the iconic ‘leaping hare’.
In this sculpture the hare takes a giant leap –ears aloft and limbs outstretched in a burst of youthful energy– over a steel lattice plinth which evokes a pyramid. Read more -
Fabienne Verdier: Vortex
6 October–24 November 2020 Waddington Custot present 'Vortex', a remarkable new series by the celebrated contemporary abstract painter, Fabienne Verdier. Through her work, Verdier gives physical form to the usually invisible and intangible forces... Read more
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Pablo Reinoso
Online exhibitions and gallery presentation 4 September–25 October 2020 This autumn, Waddington Custot celebrates the work of contemporary sculptor Pablo Reinoso with the launch of two Special Focus digital exhibitions and an installation of some of the artist’s most iconic works in the Cork St gallery space. These presentations, accessible both online and in person, seek to explore the Franco-Argentine artist’s ongoing interest in the contemporary interaction between humanity and the environment. Read more -
NEW WORK: David Batchelor
29 June–14 August 2020 NEW WORK: David Batchelor, opening online on 29 June, marks the third iteration of the Waddington Custot digital exhibition series and is the gallery’s first solo presentation by the Dundee-born artist. Bringing together a collection of Batchelor’s most recent sculptural works, the exhibition emphasises the artist’s distinct approach to colour, one defined by and tied to experiences of the city. Read more
