London Art Fair: Part 2.

Following from our previous article reporting about this year’s London Art Fair, here we focus on the interesting art galleries and artists in the Museum Partnership and the Platform curation of the fair.

Museum Partnership

London Art Fair partnered with the Sainsbury Centre for its annual Museum Partnership. For over 40 years, Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury collected works of art which ranged across time and place. They sought work from major European artists, as well as art and antiquities from different periods and cultures around the world. The Sainsbury Centre was first conceived after the couple generously gave their art collection to the University of East Anglia in 1973.

Spellbinding artworks from all over the world were displayed together in cultural conversations, housed in an iconic Norman Foster building. From Paris salons to a Polynesian workshop and from Francis Bacon to Mayan objects, the collections were displayed in direct and equal dialogue with each other, enabling people to walk among them and discover the inspiring human connection that speaks specifically to them.

As the world’s first museum to recognise artworks as living entities, the Sainsbury Centre invites visitors to engage with art in a unique way. At London Art Fair, the museum presented the critically acclaimed Living Art experience, encouraging visitors to step inside an exhibition case and become an artwork themselves.

Observed by iconic pieces from the Sainsbury collection, created by artists including Francis Bacon, Elisabeth Frink, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Yinka Shonibare, this inversion of the traditional viewer-artwork relationship seeks to reveal the profound connection that can emerge between individuals and art, offering a path to self-discovery.

Jago Cooper, Director of the Sainsbury Centre, said: “We were delighted to be collaborating with London Art Fair in 2025. We hope visitors to the fair enjoyed discovering how our incredible art museum is developing new ways to connect people with our world class collection.

The Sainsbury Centre was founded with the radical idea of removing the barriers that exist between art and people and believes in the ability of museums to activate social change. Our museum has created some innovative ways of bringing that raw power of art to life, and visitors to the fair will be able to try out these new Living Art ideas themselves, not least as they step inside the exhibition case and see the art looking at them.”

Platform

The 2025 edition of Platform was curated by independent curator Becca Pelly-Fry, whose work stands at the intersection of contemporary art, healing practices and ecology. The section, entitled Today for you, tomorrow for me, took inspiration from the practice of ‘ayni’, as lived by the Q’ero people of Peru. It proposes a reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world as a way of keeping in balance with the land, other beings and each other.

Recognising how indigenous knowledge has now found resonance in Western science, the Platform exhibition explored stories of the complex interwoven ecosystems, mycelial networks and interspecies communication that compose the natural world, shifting from a human-centric worldview to one of interdependent multiplicity.

Becca brought together art from eight galleries and an independent curator, Anna Souter, that responded to this overarching theme in an attempt to re-wild visitors’ imaginations, fostering a more reciprocal relationship with nature. Ione & Mann showcased works by Russian-born, Nottingham-based artist Yelena Popova and Slovakian artist Jana Emburey. Both artists’ processes are inextricably linked to the natural world and our relationship with it.

Popova creates paintings using linen from flax plants and earth pigments, addressing climate change and ecological estrangement, while Emburey employs a rich visual vocabulary, ranging from intricate compositions to fluid soak-stain abstract topographies, to explore humanity’s place in the cosmos, time and space.

Meanwhile, 99 Projects showed works by Poppy Lennox, whose work with wood, paint, and thread explores structures within the cosmos and nature’s intricate systems and patterns, making visible the interconnectivity of life. Moreover, Soho Revue brought works by the London-based contemporary Japanning lacquer artists Tuesday Riddell and Rene Gonzalez, who portray animal and human characters in dream-like natural landscapes, reflecting the experience of living as an outsider navigating an adopted environment.

In addition, Julian Page presented British artist Abigail Norris’s works, whose ‘tree scrying’ series examines the complex relationships between humans and living beings and Izena Studios exhibited ceramic works by Daniela Maria that examine the mythologies and relationships between humans and nature, landscape paintings by Joe Morrow, and sculptures by Luke Hamel Cooke that explore ‘physis’ – the projected fictional evolutions of nature.

Becca Pelly-Fry said, ‘Today for you, tomorrow for me is an invitation to live in harmony with Mother Earth, and with each other. If we start with giving, rather than taking, everything might look different. The artists exhibiting make artwork about the earth, nature, spirituality and emotional connections. Essentially, they are interested in exploring what love for all beings looks like.’

For more information about this fair please visit londonartfair.co.uk.

Cover art: Yelena Popova, Solid Breath, Post Petrochemical Painting Series 2024, earth pigment on Irish linen, 28 and 16 cm diameter, © Yelena Popova Courtesy of the Artist and IONE & MANN_C

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