CANOPY at The Painting Rooms, Soho

Canopy Collections is delighted to announce CANOPY, an off-site group exhibition bringing together fifteen artists at the historic Painting Rooms in Soho, London. The show celebrates the breadth of painting within the gallery’s stable and the medium’s enduring ability to transform how we see and experience the world.

Artists exhibiting include David Batchelor, Charlotte Beaudry, Richard J. Butler, Thomas Cameron, Lara Davies, Anna Freeman Bentley, Sarah Lederman, Irvin Pascal, Emerson Pullman, Dan Rees, Macarena Rojas Osterling, William Stein, Marianne Thoermer, Ian Whittlesea and Aethan Wills.

Throughout its history, painting has offered a means of recording everyday life, constructing imagined worlds and giving form to ideas beyond words. Its traditions have been continually revisited and challenged, with successive generations finding new possibilities in the relationship between pigment, surface and image. Bringing together figurative and abstract works, CANOPY offers a snapshot of how artists within the gallery’s roster continue to extend this history, drawing on its conventions while developing distinctly personal visual languages.

Across the exhibition, observations of the everyday sit alongside invented spaces and intuitive explorations of colour, gesture and material. Rather than proposing a single theme or shared aesthetic, the presentation allows connections to emerge between different generations and approaches, inviting visitors to consider what painting can convey today.

Beyond their gallery programme, Canopy Collections has built a reputation for creating distinctive art displays in unexpected places, bringing contemporary works into dialogue with historic architecture, domestic interiors and spaces beyond the conventional gallery. These exhibitions place the encounter with art at their centre, using the character of each setting to open up new ways of looking and imagining living with the works.

At The Painting Rooms, this approach finds a particularly resonant setting. Redeveloped in 1904 by the scenic painting firm Elms Lester, the building was designed for the production of theatrical scenery and backdrops. Its central painting rooms housed four enormous cast-iron frames, operated by electric winches, which allowed canvases to be raised and lowered as artists worked. Here, painting was both a practical craft and an act of illusion: a means of turning pigment and canvas into streets, interiors and imagined worlds for the stage.

Practical information
FREE ticketed entry 
Opening hours: 26—29 November, 11am—6pm
Address: The Painting Rooms, 1-5 Flitcroft Street, London WC2H 8DH
For more information, visit canopy-collections.com

Please note that there is no step-free access