Three London Summer Group Shows Opened in 48 Hours. The Hang Is the Story

♦ ♦ ♦ JULY 22, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Three London Summer Group Shows Opened in 48 Hours. The Hang Is the Story At a Glance Three London galleries opened group shows within forty-eight hours and a ten-minute walk of each other, and how each one is hung says more than any of the checklists. Cross town. Twenty-six Cork Street. Six Heddon Street. Thirty-nine Dover Street. Three gallery floors inside a ten-minute Mayfair walk, and across 16 and 17 July all three filled at once: Goodman Gallery’s “Summer Show” (16 July to 12 September), Pippy Houldsworth’s “I dwell in Possibility” (17 July to 28 August), Gazelli Art House’s “Interweave” (17 July to 19 September). Walked in one afternoon they stop being three checklists and become one argument about how to put unrelated pictures on a wall. Why a summer group show is the hardest hang of the gallery year In a solo show the paintings were made in each other’s company. They share a key, a scale logic, a light. The wall has an author. A group show does not. Every picture arrives from a different studio with different assumptions, and the gallery has about a week to decide who stands next to whom. That decision does more good or harm than anything in the press release. The failure mode is rarely quality. It is value key. Put a high-key painting, all light and half-tone, beside a low-key one, and the low-key picture stops reading as a picture and starts reading as a hole in the wall. Goodman’s list makes this live: new and historical work by Ghada Amer, William Kentridge, David Koloane, Laura Lima, Misheck Masamvu, Cassi Namoda, Georgina Maxim, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Yinka Shonibare. Nine artists, and the historical works carry decades of settled varnish while the new ones are still bright and open. Under identical spots the old looks tired and the new looks loud, and neither is what it actually is. What eleven artists on one Heddon Street floor does to the pictures Houldsworth’s show is curated with the London painter Shaqúelle Whyte: eleven artists searching out “moments that hover at the threshold of articulation, suspended in time and space.” Eleven is a lot for that footprint. What I look for in a painter-curated hang is air: whether the person choosing the wall left a stretch of it empty so a quiet picture could stay quiet. Painters usually do, because they know what a crowded neighbour costs. Dealers under checklist pressure usually do not. Heddon Street tells within thirty seconds. Why a textile show and a painting show want opposite light Gazelli is the interesting problem. Artdaily’s 18 July piece calls Interweave “a group exhibition bringing together artists whose practices connect to textile traditions while extending them into contemporary territories”: five artists, Adam de Boer, Bea Bonafini, LoVid, Joan Truckenbrod and aurèce vettier, across batik, tapestry, Jacquard weaving, carpet inlay, embroidery, digital image-making and AI. Here is the part a review will not mention. Woven and embroider