Exhibiting at Holy Art — London, 2023
- Ben Sheppee
- Jul 13, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
In 2023, I exhibited work at The Holy Art Gallery in London — one of a network of contemporary art spaces with locations across London, New York, Athens, and beyond, dedicated to presenting emerging and established artists working across all mediums.
The Work
The pieces shown at Holy Art were part of my ongoing typographic practice — works that draw on an archive of over 300 global alphabets to create compositions that sit at the boundary between graphic design and fine art. The gallery context placed the work in direct conversation with other contemporary practitioners, which is always valuable. You learn things about your own work by seeing it alongside others — scale, tone, visual weight, conceptual register all become relative rather than absolute.
Group Shows and Visibility
Group exhibitions serve a different purpose to solo shows. A solo show is an argument — a sustained statement about what the practice is and what it's trying to do. A group show is a conversation. The work has to hold its own in a room full of competing voices, and in doing so it reveals which of its qualities are strongest.
For my typographic work, gallery contexts consistently highlight the tension between the systematic and the expressive — between the researched archive of global scripts and the intuitive compositional decisions that organise them on the page or wall. Viewers who know nothing about the source alphabets respond to the visual rhythm and formal balance. Viewers who recognise characters from their own writing systems have a completely different, more personal encounter. Both responses are legitimate, and group exhibitions make that plurality of reading visible.
2023 was a productive year for exhibitions, with shows in London and Sao Paulo alongside the Times Square screening. Each venue — from a London gallery to a Brazilian art space to a New York billboard — required the work to adapt and communicate differently. That adaptability is something I increasingly value in the practice.
