Jonathan Anderson is in the process of falling back in love with London. “With the COVID-19 pandemic, with Brexit, I think there’s been a bit of fatigue around the idea of what the city can be,” he explains. “Coming out of the haze of crisis, over the past year I’ve realized how much London has given me, and how much I love the city.”
It’s the topography of the British capital—the winding and dimly lit alleys of Soho, its red-walled pubs (which across the country are vanishing at a rate of two a day), its concrete skateparks—that has inspired “On Foot,” Anderson’s latest art exhibition at Offer Waterman gallery in Mayfair. The show offers a curatorial meander across the city, bringing together in dialogue—like commuters, flâneurs, or tourists—contemporary artists and canonical modern British artworks, alongside sculptural and figure-transforming fashion designs from Anderson’s eponymous label JW Anderson and Loewe.
As you enter the ground floor of the gallery, two car-shaped dresses from Loewe’s fall 2022 collection signal you are on a busy London street, taxis honking and exhaust fumes churning. “It’s this idea of the road,” Anderson says, where artworks by William Turnbull and Sara Flynn that ascend Offer Waterman’s grand staircase evoke an idea of being in motion, and “what you see when you look through a car window blurred with condensation, or when walking with sunglasses on.”
Upstairs, on the first floor, in scenes that call to mind the throngs that cross London Bridge in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Anderson brings us into a room that depicts the London crowd. A textural paint-piled cityscape of Kilburn by Kossoff sits alongside a 1940s sketch of standing figures by Henry Moore, curvaceous pots by longtime Anderson collaborator Magdalene Odundo, and a 1946 sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. Anderson, of course, staged his first exhibition, “Disobedient Bodies” at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2017, and this show could almost be an evolution of its theme, one which homed in on the human figure in art, fashion, and design. “My first knowledge of Hepworth was studying at the London College of Fashion and seeing her sculpture on the side of the John Lewis building. Then seeing her studio in St. Ives. This room is about dialogue, conversation, people in groups, how different people come to London all across the world and make it their home.”
Through Anderson’s crowds, you enter the skatepark, where a jumper protruding with a skateboard from JW Anderson’s spring 2023 menswear collection—once a symbol of youth culture that has been “hijacked by fashion as something glamorous and trendy”—sits alongside paintings by Lowry, Hockney, and haunting figurations by Loewe collaborator Florian Krewer. A 2022 painting by Richard Hawkins—featuring the floating head of Justin Bieber and “a guy taking a dick pic”—evokes adolescent obsession with technology, and what Anderson describes as “kids sitting in parks on their phones.”
Next door, in a tiny room—which calls to mind a secret smoking area on a building’s fire exit, or a square of scaffolding on a construction site—a flock of pigeons lie in wait. Here, JW Anderson’s signature pigeon clutch (also carried on the streets of Manhattan by Carrie Bradshaw) have been graffitied by longtime Loewe collaborator Anthea Hamilton, and chirp alongside a masterful painting of a pigeon by Freud. “The room feels half coop, half peep show,” Anderson explains, before we head upstairs.
“I like this idea that in Britain we are obsessed by flowers,” Anderson explains as we enter the first room on the second floor, a homage to London’s parks, featuring an “orchestra of irises” by painter Cedric Morris, bold floral collages by Joe Brainard, the metal anthurium breastplates that featured in Loewe’s spring 2023 collection, and an incredibly rare exploded pot resembling unfurling petals by Lucie Rie.
Our final topographical pitstop? Anderson’s take on the London pub, an intimate, red-walled space where the reflective bubble dress from his eponymous brand’s spring 2023 collection serves as a bulbous lamp, illuminating artistic figures, from Christopher Wood to Hockney. “I wanted to imagine a dialogue between Lucian Freud or Walter Sickert,” Anderson says. “It’s about this idea of debate and conversation, something that should probably be protected in Britain.”
“After so many years of transition, lockdown, Brexit, when you look at all these different paintings, it reminds you you would not have Freud without London,” Anderson adds. “The city can be this melting pot of information and ideas, and its self-confidence is coming back again. The exhibition is really about falling back in love with getting on a bus in London and looking out the window.”