Private View | Thursday 16 July 2026 | 6-8 pm
Michael Armitage
Denzil Forrester
Jake Grewal
Hettie Inniss
Sosa Joseph
Ken Kiff
R.B. Kitaj
Masao Nakahara
Jennifer Packer
Antonia Showering
Shaqúelle Whyte
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present I dwell in Possibility, a group exhibition with 11 artists who explore the in-between, searching out moments that hover at the threshold of articulation, suspended in time and space. Curated in collaboration with London-based painter Shaqúelle Whyte, the exhibition draws its title from Emily Dickinson's c.1862 poem I dwell in Possibility, printed overleaf.
In her poem, Dickinson imagines poetry as a capacious home, a literary form that holds greater expressive potential than prose, "more numerous of windows" and "superior - for Doors”. For Dickinson, the poem resists enclosure, it is mutable and alive to interpretation. As in Dickinson's verse, the paintings in I dwell in Possibility refuse fixed categorisation. Suspended between abstraction and figuration, memory and observation, presence and absence, these paintings occupy a borderline terrain in which ideas emerge, transmute, and reform.
The exhibition presents a lineage of painters who hold an investment in ambiguity as a generative condition. Late British painter Ken Kiff's visionary imagery unfolds within a realm where subconscious narrative remains deliberately unstable. The late American artist R. B. Kitaj brought together his Jewish identity and fervent imagination in paintings of disorientation and human complexity. Both were associated with the likes of Frank Auerbach, David Hockney and Leon Kossoff since the 1960s as well as other members of the School of London, a term first used in Kitaj’s 1976 catalogue essay for The Human Clay at The Hayward Gallery, London. Kiff and Kitaj helped to foster a shift in British artistic consciousness, challenging the preexisting limitations of figurative painting in a time dominated by Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
If Kiff and Kitaj helped shape a renewed language for figurative painting in Britain, Grenada-born, Cornwall-based artist Denzil Forrester has expanded that legacy through his depictions of London’s Caribbean community. His works celebrate the 1980’s reggae and dub scene, figures blurred in motion, whilst also addressing systemic injustices towards Black Londoners. Brixton Blue (2018) – a major work commissioned by Art on the Underground for the 2019 mural at Brixton Underground Station, and later a highlight of the 2021 Hayward Gallery exhibition Mixing it Up: Painting Today – exists in the antagonism between nightlife and police control. This important work takes a new stance on Forrester's early painting in the Tate Collection, Three Wicked Men (1982), a painting torn between joy and concern, currently on view at Tate Britain.
Across the generative possibility of poetry, the flux and fervour of Kitaj and Kiff’s figuration, and Forrester’s pulsing dancefloors, we are drawn to philosophies of liminality, modes of being beyond classification. Popularised by British anthropologist Victor Turner in 1967, liminality was first conceptualised as the destabilising shift in identity during the coming of age, where a brief withdrawal from the social norm creates an anti-structural politicising of one’s relation to the world. In this framework exist Michael Armitage, Shaqúelle Whyte, and Sosa Joseph’s examinations of figuration. For these painters, psychological worlds are played out corporeally, and the workings of personal politics come up against epic pillars of religion, myth and storytelling. As they each draw upon the collective cultural experiences of their respective Jamaican, Kenyan and Indian ancestry, landscape and figure intertwine, the self evolving within context and ritual. Here liminality exists in the figure’s relational instability, presenting bodies that are uncertain of their boundaries, or where they begin and end.
For London-born painters Jake Grewal, Antonia Showering and Hettie Inniss, painting too serves as a vessel for understanding liminality and multiplicity. Their works present landscape, memory and imagined architecture in states of delirium or disorientation. From the murky sublime of Grewal’s woodlands, Showering’s surreal arcadias, to the nostalgia of Inniss’s sun-drenched environments, the artists evoke an unresolved sense of place. They invite introspection, leaving interpretation open, as, wide as the ‘Doors’ and ‘Windows’ of Dickinson’s poetic imaginary.
Finally, in the practices of Masao Nakahara and Jennifer Packer, liminality matures and completes its life cycle, shifting from its ethnographic roots in the rituals of adolescence to a consideration of mortality, remembrance and the afterlife. Nakahara focuses on the Japanese concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ), the transience of life, its blossoming beauty and its inevitable passing. Packer's intimate flower paintings reference 16th century Dutch vanitas paintings as she engages with grief, care and commemoration in relation to loss and violence within Black American communities. Packer's paintings locate moments of quiet resilience within mourning itself, whilst Nakahara approaches this final transition of the self with humour and tenderness, a resolution found in a drifting ephemerality.
Together, these artists approach painting as a site of untethered potential that is grounded in personal experience. We are offered doorways into private memory, glimpses of torment, of paradise, and all that exists in-between.
I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -
Of Chambers as the Cedars -
Impregnable of eye -
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky -
Of Visitors - the fairest -
For Occupation - This -
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
Emily Dickinson
published posthumously in Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1929
About the artists
Michael Armitage (b. 1984, Nairobi, Kenya) lives and works between Nairobi and London. Selected solo institutional exhibitions include Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2026-7); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2023); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020), travelled to Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2020); and Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019), amongst many others.
Denzil Forrester (b. 1956, St Andrew, Grenada) lives and works in Cornwall, UK. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include ICA Miami, FL (2023); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2023); and Nottingham Contemporary (2020), travelled to Spike Island, Bristol (2021). He was awarded an MBE in December 2020, and a large-scale public artwork for Brixton Underground Station was unveiled by Transport for London in September 2019.
Jake Grewal (b. 1994, London, UK) lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include Studio Voltaire, London (2025); Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2023); and Thomas Dane, London (2022). Last year he was included in exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York, NY; Pace Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Victoria Miro Gallery, Venice; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; and Bortolami Gallery, New York NY.
Hettie Inniss (b. 1999, London, UK) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (2025); GRIMM, Amsterdam, New York, NY, and London (2025 2024; 2023); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (2025); and a duo presentation with Cece Philips, Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2024).
Sosa Joseph (b. 1971, Kerala, India) lives and works in London. Exhibitions include David Zwirner, New York, NY and London (2025; 2024); Stevenson, Amsterdam and Cape Town (2025; 2023); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2022); 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), amongst others.
Ken Kiff (1935–2001, Dagenham, UK) was one of the leading British painters of his generation, first brought to recognition in the 1979 exhibition Narrative Paintings at ICA, London, curated by Timothy Hyman. Solo institutional exhibitions of his work have been held at The Serpentine Gallery (1975; 1986); Mead Gallery, Warwickshire (1997); The National Gallery, London (1993); and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2018).
R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007, Cleveland, OH) lived and worked in London, UK, and Los Angeles, CA. Along with Ken Kiff, he was a key figure of the British “School of London”, elected to the Royal Academy in 1991, and awarded the Golden Lion at the 1995 Venice Biennale. Retrospectives of his work have been held at LACMA, CA (1965); the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (1981); Tate, London, travelled to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and LACMA, CA (1994); and The Jewish Museum, Berlin, travelled to Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2012).
Masao Nakahara (b. 1941, Fukuoka, Japan) lives and works in Krefeld, Germany. In 2026 he will be included in Two Things Called Me, The Urawa Art Museum, Tokyo. His recent solo exhibitions include Walk in the Maze Forest, Sens Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Daydreams and Memories, Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam (2022); and Departure and Arrival & Fear and Hope, ES 365, Dusseldorf, Germany (2021).
Jennifer Packer (b. 1984, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. Her solo institutional exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA (2021); Serpentine Galleries, London, travelled to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2020-22); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2017).
Antonia Showering (b. 1991, London, UK) lives and works in Somerset. Her recent exhibitions include Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2026); Timothy Taylor, New York, NY, and London (2025; 2022); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK (2024); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023); and South London Gallery, London (2018), amongst others.
Shaqúelle Whyte (b. 2000, Wolverhampton, UK) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2026); White Cube, Hong Kong (2026); Nasher Museum at Duke University, NC (2025); No.1 Royal Crescent, Bath (2025); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2024); and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (2024; 2025). Collections include the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Nasher Museum at Duke University, NC; ICA Miami, FL; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (via The Contemporary Art Society Frieze Fund 2025), and Arts Council Collection (via ACC Frieze Fund 2024).
