Yum

Tasty stuff from across London's cultural landscape

Sliced Bread (Golden Hour), 2025 by Kathleen Ryan at Gagosian Davies Street

It’s been a quiet week because we’ve finished the season for The London Theatre Review podcast (did I mention I had a podcast? Did I mention we have a LIVE RECORDING coming up on September 20 at the Royal Court? Did I mention you can book now, here?), so I’ve had some rare evenings off, which have been mostly spent on the sofa watching comfort TV (Silent Witness; New Tricks. Don’t judge, we all have our vices).

What I’ve seen

I was so happily ensconced I feared there wasn’t even going to be a What I’ve Seen section this week, but I have managed to catch a couple of things. American sculptor Kathleen Ryan’s bijou show Roman Meal at Gagosian Davies Street until August 15 is great, worth popping by if you happen to be in the West End.

She’s interested in ideas of seduction of repulsion, refinement and vulgarity, and makes massive versions of everyday objects and organic forms (in this case, a piece of mouldy toast and a couple of slices of elderly lemon), creating the bloom of their degradation out of beads and semi-precious materials. They’re fab. See if you can spot the dolphins.

Very much worth the effort is Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which runs to October 19. I reviewed it in The Times last week (read that here) but it’s a treat. Jones straddles the terrain between figuration and abstraction, and is obsessed with mouths, so looming out of her vivid, colourful canvases you always see strange representations of teeth and tongues, licked lips.

It’s a great show, and if the relationship between her work and the Dulwich collection painting that provided a catalyst isn’t immediately obvious, I don’t think that’s a particular problem. It’s always interesting to see how an artist moves forward from a moment of inspiration within their own visual language, and hers feels pretty unique. Jones is one of Britain’s hottest young painters right now, and Dulwich is always worth a visit in any case, you forget what good stuff they’ve got.

I will be out and about a bit more next week, I just needed a few days of vegetating.

Also on

I’m looking forward to catching Pictograms at Japan House on Kensington High Street, it’s exactly the sort of thing they do really well. Japan, and the economy and precision of its design, has played an integral role in the development of the wordless signs that guide us globally in our day to day life, from street signs and emojis (a word that originated in Japan) to toilet doors and maps.

This show traces the history and evolution of pictograms from Ancient Egypt to present day Japan and elsewhere. It also includes a display of selected pictograms designed by young people, who were invited to represent their London in graphic form, and visitors can create their own unique symbol from a selection of component pieces, move amongst giant pictograms and take the controls of a Japanese train. It just opened, and runs to November 9.