Marking the beginning of 2025 with its signature collaborative energy, Condo London returned this January to inject a sense of vibrancy into the city’s art scene. Founded in 2016 by Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa, Condo has evolved into a much-anticipated staple of the contemporary art calendar. Its ethos—rooted in resource sharing, community building, and curatorial dialogue—remains steadfast. It’s also a wonderful chance to get in those steps and explore parts of London you don’t always get to visit.
This year’s edition features 49 international galleries across 22 London spaces, offering fertile grounds for cross-cultural exchange. As ever, the collaborations oscillated between co-curated exhibitions and a division of spaces, each interaction imbued with the distinct personalities of the galleries involved. The 2025 iteration of Condo pulsed with energy, as galleries beyond the official programme also contribute to the city’s effervescent art scene. From monumental solo shows to smaller, intimately staged exhibitions, this year feels particularly charged, with a palpable sense of creative momentum.
Among the standout presentations was New York’s Francis Irv hosted by Brunette Coleman. The exhibition showcased Zazou Roddam and Rachel Fäth, two artists deeply engaged with the materiality of memory. Roddam’s Lot 52 (2) captured the peculiar efforts of preservation through a series of polaroids depicting a Roman wall nestled incongruously in a London car park. Meanwhile, Fäth’s sculptural works, which manipulated industrial steel into fluid, almost playful forms, danced with the architectural rhythms of the gallery space, offering a dialogue between weight and lightness, permanence and transformation.
At Emalin, a collaborative exhibition with Antenna Space, Shanghai, entitled Evidence, exemplifies the introspective and exploratory spirit of this year’s Condo. Aslan Goisum and Peng Zuqiang investigate the materiality of images and the opacity of interpretation, weaving together moving and still images, cameraless film, and staged scenes. Goisum’s evocative photographs juxtapose immediacy with deliberate material processes, presenting subjects that hover between visibility and silence, light and shadow. Zuqiang’s works, including the cameraless Déjà Vu and the pop-inflected video installation Autocorrects, probe the continuity of violence and the fraught process of self-articulation. Together, the artists navigate the complex terrain of affect, subjectivity, and the limits of comprehension, crafting a visual and emotional dialogue that lingers long after viewing.
At Phillida Reid, the mood shifted towards the theatrical. Sharing their space with LA-based Ehrlich Steinberg, the gallery presented works by Lea Cetera, Prem Sahib, and Edward Thomasson alongside TJ Shin and Abbas Zahedi. Cetera’s poignant photographic works and performative installations were interspersed with Sahib’s luminous Reverse Paintings, while Thomasson’s garland of painted figures evoked a processional intimacy. In contrast, Ehrlich Steinberg’s contribution felt weightier, as Shin’s hand-bound reinterpretations of British literary classics and Zahedi’s enigmatic installations asked probing questions about identity and collective memory.
Soft Opening’s presentation brings together the works of Gene Beery and Kern Samuel, showcasing a dynamic dialogue between Beery’s satirical text-based paintings and Samuel’s materially rich compositions. Beery’s legacy, spanning over five decades, is celebrated with five late works that embody his playful Dadaist sensibility and signature use of neologisms, puns, and proclamations. Meanwhile, Kern Samuel’s recent quilt-inspired paintings explore themes of labour and materiality, drawing from quilting traditions like Gee’s Bend’s One-Patch to create a cohesive whole from fragmented studio scraps.
At Arcadia Missa, the interplay between Lewis Hammond and Dominique White unfolds in a serpent and a dragon walk into a museum of early modern artefacts, a title as serpentine as the works themselves. The exhibition hosts Florence-based Veda, casting two distinct artistic visions into a shared narrative. Hammond’s paintings, with their earthy tones and unsettling refusal to remain static under the gaze, invite audiences to confront their need for objects to yield to comprehension. White’s works, by contrast, are dragon-coded—a methodology that charges headfirst into disintegration and transformation, embracing destruction as a path to renewal.
Carlos/Ishikawa and Seoul’s Jason Haam offered a striking pairing of conceptual rigour and aesthetic depth. Sable Elyse Smith’s exploration of institutional violence through recontextualised media footage and Moka Lee’s luminous portraits set the stage for Jason Haam’s trio of artists: Jihyoung Han, Jungwook Kim, and Mike Lee. Each brought a distinct voice, from Han’s explorations of digital dissonance to Kim’s ethereal ink drawings and Lee’s stark monochromatic compositions.
Studio M becomes a site of layered inquiry as Maureen Paley hosts Air de Paris for Condo London 2025, presenting Pati Hill and Wolfgang Tillmans. Hill’s xerographs (1977–1990) transform objects like scissors and fruit into spectral still lifes, exploring domestic labour and the copier’s potential to unify art and text. Alongside, Tillmans’ CLC 800, dismantled, a (2011) deconstructs the photocopier, exposing its core as both subject and facilitator of image-making. Together, their works interrogate the boundaries of replication, abstraction, and the poetic possibilities within the surfaces of modern life.
Condo London 2025 is a collaborative exhibition by 49 galleries across 22 London spaces.
Lore Alender is a writer and publicist based in London.
