At London Gallery Weekend, the Non-Painters Are Betting on Paint

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 07, 2026 | 3 MIN READ At London Gallery Weekend, the Non-Painters Are Betting on Paint At a Glance Three London Gallery Weekend shows hand the anchor wall to artists who built their names on film, performance, and sound, and the paintings are worth crossing town to test. Walk into Sprüth Magers on Grafton Street this week and the first things in the way are crowd-control barriers. Past them, a four-channel film. And on the wall, holding the room, two big Wave painting s. The show is Anne Imhof’s “Citizen” (5 June to 1 August), her London Gallery Weekend entry, and Imhof is a performance artist. The painting s are the anchor. That is the thread I kept noticing across this year’s Gallery Weekend, the sixth edition, more than 120 galleries, 5 to 7 June. Several of the strongest rooms hand the anchor wall to an artist who made their name in some other medium entirely. Why a performance artist hanging Wave paintings is the show to read The Sprüth Magers announcement lists the room plainly: “two new large-scale Wave paintings, alongside a four-channel film, site-specific sculptures, oil pastel drawings on canvas, and her latest bronze reliefs.” Imhof stages bodies for a living. Here she is staging canvases. The painter’s question in a room like that is simple and a little ruthless: is the painting load-bearing, or is it set-dressing? You can read the answer in the hang. If the Wave paintings get the clean wall, the controlled light, the distance to be seen as paintings, then Imhof trusts them to hold on their own terms. If they are crowded by the barriers and the film, lit like backdrop, then they are one more surface in the environment and the spectacle is doing the work. In a total environment, the painting is either load-bearing or it’s wallpaper, and the hang tells you which. Imhof’s case for paint is real enough that the show includes a diptych of a head, enlarged from an earlier drawing, built up through accumulative mark-making. That is a painter’s move, not a stagehand’s. Worth crossing town for. The thread: when the anchor wall goes to film, sound, and performance Two more rooms run the same bet. Rachel Maclean, who built her name on saturated CGI film, opens “The Enchantment of Reason” at Josh Lilley (5 June to 1 August), bringing painting, sculpture and film into one space about AI and authorship. And Oliver Beer, known for sound and installation, shows large-scale Resonance Paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac (through 31 July) that, in the gallery’s framing, put sound vibrations on canvas. Three artists, three media that move or sound or perform, all three landing on the one surface that just hangs there and holds still. What a painter watches for is whether the still surface survives the company it keeps. A canvas next to a four-channel film is at a frequency disadvantage: moving light and sound pull the eye, and a painting asks the eye to slow down and stay. Hang it wrong and it loses every time. Hang it right, give it its own wall an