Aiming “to help stimulate connection and engagement during this unprecedented period of physical isolation being experienced worldwide,” London’s Public Gallery is hosting its first-ever exclusively online exhibition. Titled No Time Like The Present, the group show includes over fifty artists working on a wide range of media spanning illustration, painting, photography and textile, and each of them has even worked on a specially commissioned video piece for this online exhibition.
“Now is a time for imagination, invention, and experimentation, leveraging each as a means of producing new kinds of knowledge about our situation and new modes of struggle within it,” says artist and theorist Ian Alan Paul. Indeed, quarantine has made several artists re-think the way they work, the materials they use and the surfaces they use as canvas. As the text exhibition reads, “the environment in which art is being made has changed. For the time being, many artists are without access to their studios, regular materials and like everybody else the ability to continue with their everyday lives.”

For No Time Like The Present, Public Gallery has asked over fifty artists to work on a special piece for the online exhibition as well as on a short videos, which act in some instances as independent works, in others as extensions of the physical works, as well as snippets of life under lockdown and the feelings that have come to fruition – from Rose Nestler’s artistic piece featuring blue hands to Sasha Gordon’s TikTok choreographies, to Lily Wong’s funny portrait of NYC during quarantine.
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Austin Eddy, The Half Empty Stream Carries Birds Over The Thin And Bumpy Beds of Stone, 2019.
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Bambou Gili, Neighborhood Sleep Paralysis, 2020.
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Brittney Leeanne Williams, An Interruption, 2020.
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Coline Marotta, To love somebody, 2020.
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Cristina de Miguel, We like ants, 2020.
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Georgina Clapham, Homage to Alexander McQueen, 2020.
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Hadas Auerbach, Eating _ Kissing 1, 2020.
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Hadas Auerbach, Eating _ Kissing 2, 2020.
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Jane Hayes Greenwood, Oviferum, 2019.
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Johnny Izatt-Lowry, Self Portrait at the Kitchen Table, 2020.
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József Csató, Errors for happiness, 2020.
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Ryan Orme, Untitled, 2020.
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Sarah Thibault, Heating up the sauna (study), 2020.
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Sasha Gordon, Flirting with no one, 2020.
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Sofya Shpurova, Untitled, 2020.