Unfolding in London during the city’s bustling Frieze Week, EXISTENTIAL LICENCE positions itself as both proposition and permission: a gathering of contemporary artists whose works claim the right to move between forms, territories, and states of being. Presented in the intimacy of a Victorian residential property in Peckham, the exhibition offers a space for depth, exchange and unhurried encounter.
EXISTENTIAL LICENCE is an exhibition devoted to pure abstraction, where artists find freedom rather than apprehension in the dissolution of form, and vitality in the shifting thresholds of time and energy. Abstraction becomes an existential stance, not a retreat into the intangible, but a refusal of the safe and the fixed; an embrace of the unstable as fertile ground. Against the reassurance of the ‘real’, the featured works release colour, gesture and material as ungoverned forces, charged with the momentum of liberation.
The exhibition brings together a diverse and international constellation of mid-career and emerging artists whose practices collectively affirm abstraction as a transnational language of freedom and energy.
Participating Artists
*denotes new commission
Sinéad Aldridge (IE), *James Capper (UK/IT), *Diana Copperwhite (IE/UK), *Rian Coughlan (IE/UK), *Jo Dennis (UK), *Bobby Dowler (UK/FR), Paul Embleton (UK), *Sheenagh Geoghegan (IE), *Christopher Green (UK), *Sue Kennington (UK/IT), Erin Lawlor (IE/UK), *Catherine Long (UK), *Shaun McDowell (UK/IE/IT), *Meletios Meletiou (Magnus Tempus Network, CY/IT), *CristalloOdescalchi (Magnus Tempus Network, IT), Innocenzo Odescalchi (IT), *Pía Ortuño (CR/UK), *Joe Reihsen (US), Mateo Revillo (ES/FR)
Curated by Shaun McDowell and Halime Özdemir di Larusso, the exhibition blends McDowell’s instinct for painterly risk and chromatic charge with Özdemir di Larusso’s global production expertise and institutional gravitas. Working extensively in the UK, Italy and internationally, and most recently through Magnus Tempus 360, a newly launched cultural platform positioning Cyprus as a cultural hub with growing international visibility for the Mediterranean, her leverage within these diverse art contexts ensures that the exhibition is not only rooted in Peckham’s independent tradition of artist-led spaces but is also connected to a wider institutional ecology.
Both McDowell and Özdemir di Larusso carry deep cultural and professional ties to the regions activated in this exhibition: London, Italy, Ireland and the Mediterranean, with Cyprus at its heart. Their worlds have collided over the years across practices and disciplines EXISTENTIAL LICENCE becomes a moment of convergence: a renaissance of energies, forging new pathways between the places they most cherish.
The exhibition also extends McDowell’s history of staging exhibitions in South London’s residential and occupied spaces. From the landmark gatherings at 78 Lyndhurst Way to the dynamic shows at 88 Friary Road, he has consistently drawn to SE15, creating a sense of urgency and movement within the locale. EXISTENTIAL LICENCE builds upon that legacy while opening it outward, placing Peckham in direct dialogue with the international stage and reasserting abstraction as a transnational language.
