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Fankle Art Collective's Flow at Brixton Tate Library

  • 23 hours ago
  • 4 min read

Issue 18


A group exhibition by ten artists, working across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, collage, photography, and film and video.


Brixton Tate Library, London · 3 – 22 June 2026 · Private View Tuesday 9 June, 6 – 8pm


No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.
No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.

Some exhibitions impose a theme; Flow lets one accumulate it. Across the gallery space of Brixton Tate Library, ten members of the Fankle Art Collective gather works that move at different speeds and in different directions. Flow is the collective's fifth exhibition, and the most expansive statement.


The word Fankle is Scottish for entanglement, and it describes both the collective's working method and its make-up. Formed in 2023, Fankle's members span generations and geographies, and the show reflects that knot of origins directly.


The works here jostle and overlap in the library's gallery, sometimes competing for the eye, sometimes settling into the stillness that the phrase "flow state" actually names.


No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.
No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.

That sense of things in transit is most literal in Iliana Ortega-Alcázar's On the move: A record of colour, a screenprinted monotype that takes the imagery of colonial botanical expeditions to the Americas as its point of departure. The piece sits with the colonial fascination for newly encountered plants and the simultaneous compulsion to categorise and control them.


A parallel meditation on transformation runs through Jan Pimblett's One Thing Leads to Another, three related works built from driftwood, electronics and ceramic interventions. Pimblett stages deliberate tension between organic and manufactured matter to probe memory, place and lived experience. 


That logic of extends to Phil Dunn, who has been immersing himself in the flows of water and time. His Unfiltered? continues a quest to refill two magic lantern slide boxes once belonging to the London Metropolitan Water Board: pencil drawings of original slides depicting bacteria, scaled up and destined to be digitally reduced back into lantern slides, shown here as a process step.Alongside, Freddy McBride's Empty Vessel (Study 01) keeps to the scale of a study, in marker and pastel on paper.


No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.
No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.

Several artists in Flow treat their medium less as a vehicle than as a subject. Natalie Dee's The Unravelling Word, a collage of screen prints on tissue paper, threaded with yarn, draws on her literary background to deconstruct printed text into tactile form. Working in themes of memory and rupture, Dee reframes fragmentation as a space for renewal rather than loss.


The red thread reappears, with strikingly different weight, in Moritz Nicolai's The Bull's Grief, a large-format textile screenprint produced in his Munich studio. Luke Anthony Rooney's Quilt Series: From Jackson, with Love turns textile into testimony. Working in collage and stitch, Rooney interrogates the construction of queer identity by reclaiming language once used to discriminate.


Two practices in the show foreground gesture, chance and the physics of making. Kathy Rooney's Encircled 2 (acrylic on canvas) continues her preoccupation with the active surface — layered, often vivid colour worked directly with the pigment, breaking past conventional edges, and letting gravity carry dripping paint across the canvas. Carolyn Murphy, a London-born, Manchester-based print artist, brings work that embraces movement, chance and the flowing, infinite form of the Möbius strip.


No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.
No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953. Oil on canvas, 294 × 232 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The dual-rectangle configuration achieves an almost architectural compression — the rust field pressing downward while the blue below recedes into oceanic depth.

In a quieter, more symbolic register, Hanan Shakir's The Black Sun (acrylic and mixed media on canvas) sets a palm tree as a hinge between memory and presence – its simplified form poised against a black sun and birds, the curve of the trunk and sweep of the fronds carrying the eye toward a central light. The palm anchors the composition as a living, enduring presence, linking place, time and perception.


Alongside them, Natalie Dee, Phil Dunn, Freddy McBride, Moritz Nicolai, Iliana Ortega-Alcázar, Jan Pimblett, Kathy Rooney, Luke Anthony Rooney, Hanan Shakir and Carolyn Murphy complete the ten-strong line-up — a collective that, true to its name, is most itself when its strands are tangled.



Visitor Information


Exhibition: Flow — Fankle Art Collective Dates: 3 – 22 June 2026 Private View: Tuesday 9 June, 6pm – 8pm Venue: Brixton Tate Library, Brixton Oval, London SW2 1JQ


More information: www.fankle.art · @fankle.art on Instagram


Coverage by The Urgency of Art Magazine.



 
 
 

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