Four Free London Shows: Striptease, Steel Pans and White Figuration

Four free exhibitions open across London this season, and all four earn four stars: Maxwell Alexandre at Carlos/Ishikawa, Susan Meiselas at Huxley Parlour Photographs, Hyun-Sook Song at Sprüth Magers, and Studio/Chapple's celebration of 50 Carnaby Street at Sadie Coles. Each show closes between November and January 2027.

What does Maxwell Alexandre's 'white figuration' mean?

A vast red concrete wall splits Maxwell Alexandre's new work in two. It is the wall of the Flamengo sport club in the painter's native Rio de Janeiro, a towering crimson monolith separating rich and poor, black and white.

Alexandre joined the upmarket club in the early 2020s. He had walked past its red walls countless times as a child. The club sits on the edge of the favela he comes from, the biggest in Brazil. Inside, he found serenity, sunbathing, prosperity and whiteness — after spending his early career painting the black figures of his favela.

Success bought him access to this new world. He knew he could not paint the same black figures that made his name. The result: dozens of paintings of tropical trees and white bodies in repose, lounging and playing by the pool inside that red well. Alexandre calls the approach "white figuration".

The red walls dominate the first space, where a figure stands on a diving board and palm fronds wave. The second room is covered floor to ceiling in paintings on brown paper of the club's members, some shown beside figures from art history. It looks idyllic, hazy, almost nostalgic. But the work carries emotional complexity. It rejects the expectations placed on black artists to churn out paintings of black figures for white collectors. It is Alexandre refusing to play the game, and also trying to make sense of a divided city and an art history that does not represent him. It all looks like heaven, but even heaven is a complicated place.

Carlos/Ishikah, London — spelled correctly here as Carlos/Ishikawa — until 28 November.

What did Susan Meiselas capture backstage?

The exhaustion in Susan Meiselas's photographs is almost draining. She spent three years in the mid-1970s following a group of striptease performers touring the American sprawl, gaining their trust and capturing them at their most intimate and unguarded.

She photographs them backstage. Night after night, the women dance for gawping, dumbstruck men. Then the dancers crash. They smoke distractedly, lounge on sofas or crumple into bed. This is the end result of physical labour: total collapse, utter exhaustion. In many frames, dancers peek through the curtain back onto the stage, waiting their turn.

The posed images give the viewer little. But when Meiselas catches the dancers unaware, lost in the moment, the pictures are pretty special — stories of exploitation and entertainment that leave nothing but physical and emotional depletion.

Huxley Parlour Photographs, London, until 21 November.

How much can a few brushstrokes hold?

Hyun-Sook Song says so much with so little. The Hamburg-based Korean painter, with a handful of brushstrokes, opens an entire world: memories of deeply rural mid-century South Korea, shock at the monstrous urbanity of modern Germany, and a desperate need to find sanctuary in painting.

The titles state the minimalism plainly — 11 Brushstrokes, 6 Brushstrokes over 1 Brushstroke — because that is all they are, yet the works are more complex than that implies. Song lays each canvas flat and paints every mark in a long, sweeping, full-body motion. On dark green or black backgrounds, each swooping brushstroke creates a gossamer white veil; a brown line cuts across, a stick that seems to lift the impossibly thin curtains. The white marks reference the raw silks collected in her youth; the brown marks nod to boundary posts that delineated her childhood landscapes. The paintings are almost unbearably fragile, and all the more meditative for it.

Sprüth Magers, London, until 23 January 2027.

Why does 50 Carnaby Street matter?

Before Carnaby Street became a tourist tap, it was a proper cultural hub. Number 50 hosted six different music venues between the 1930s and 1980s — the Sunset Club in the 50s, Columbo's in the 70s — where jazz gave way to steel bands and sound systems, and where black met white.

Studio/Chapple's tiny show in Sadie Coles' downstairs project space celebrates the address just around the corner. Deep brown walls frame handmade speakers by Maya Ramnarine playing old jazz and ska records, and paintings of dancers in tightly crowded spaces. Two works stand out: Georgia Semple's dark, atmospheric vision of the Russ Henderson Steel Band — Britain's first steel pan ensemble — playing to joyful, swaying figures, and Amida Deen's 1970s scene of bodies pressed together in fiery red and heat-soaked orange as dub pours from the speakers.

It is a small love letter to music history, clubbing and dancing. You can almost smell the sweat.