Artnet Gallery NetworkJuly 16, 2025

A new show in London at Gallery Les Bois takes sharp focus on the current digital zeitgeist and its many facets-from digital saturation and the pressure to constantly engage across platforms to the environmental and human costs of the ever-growing online ecosystem.

"Offline," which is on view through July 22, 2025, in the city's Chelsea neighborhood, is also the gallery's inaugural exhibition, introducing audiences to its mission of bridging sustainability and contemporary art. Helmed by founder and director Claire-Julia Hill, Gallery Les Bois first began operations in 2024 with the intention of building a new type of gallery model that strives for environmental responsibility and artistic excellence in equal measure.

"The core ethos of Gallery Les Bois is to place sustainability, integrity, and aesthetic excellence at the center of everything we do, using these values to guide our curatorial programming," Hill told Artnet News earlier this year. "Our mission is to champion artists who are redefining contemporary art through crucially ambitious and ecologically conscious practices."

At the heart of "Offline" is Volcan, an artist duo based in Notting Hill who have gained recognition for their major projects that deal with themes of identity, narrative, and survival. Featuring pieces from two bodies of work, the first, "Offline Series," was exhibited in the Cameroon Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Comprised of 20 portraits of refugees who died crossing the Mediterranean, the subjects are shown blurred and with an incomplete delicate white over the center-alluding to the symbol that appears when an image is loading. Here, the "loading" symbol is made poignant, alluding to incomplete journeys and lost life.

The other central body of work to the show is the "Roadworks Series," in which materials commonly found in urban settings, like tar, stone, industrial paint, and other detritus, have been repurposed and upcycled to create works that speak to pervasive questions around infrastructure, displacement, and the effects of technological progress.

With further contributions to the show from artists Steve Foster, Oliver Tanay, Miranda Carter, and Jasmine Pradissitto, explorations of ecology and society via material experimentation are broadened. Pradissitto's new work absorbs pollutants, turning contamination into something creatively generative.

Despite its recent establishment and even the even more recent debut of its first exhibition, Gallery Les Bois has already established a solid foundation for its broader program, set to launch later this year. And what Hill and Gallery Les Bois have already shown is that neither sustainability nor artistic rigor need to be sacrificed but are instead generative to one another.

"Offline" is on view at Gallery Les Bois through July 22, 2025.

Original article at Creativity Meets Sustainability at This New London Gallery