Image: Paul Stolper Gallery, London
Paul Stolper is showing 'Salon', a group exhibition that gathers works by Susannah Baker-Smith, Helen Beard, Lauren Bryden, Sarah Hardacre, Susie Hamilton, Donna McLean, Grace O'Connor and Jemima Stehli. The exhibition runs from 1 July to 14 August 2026 at Paul Stolper Gallery in London, and the gallery says the presentation spans almost thirty years across paintings, prints, needlework and sculpture.
The exhibition’s chronology begins with Jemima Stehli’s 1999 'Strip #5, Dealer', described by the gallery as the earliest work in the show. The piece documents the performative nature of Stehli’s practice: she removes her clothes while the dealer, seated and holding the shutter release, determines when each photograph is taken. Paul Stolper links the work to Stehli’s broader interest in the language of looking and the power dynamics of being seen, while also including her 2024 painting 'Deep Light', which it says echoes the physicality of her earlier work through the body’s reach, movement and limitations.
Sarah Hardacre’s contribution turns to domestic objects and labor. The gallery says her latest sculptures collage nude imagery from pornographic magazines onto ornate vintage ceramics, using plates and vessels as surfaces associated with work that is “made by women, used by women, cleaned by women, and largely unseen.” The text frames the ceramics as a way to open onto feminist histories of invisible labor and the domestic interior as a site of unseen work. Hardacre’s own account, reproduced by the gallery, notes that the work also connects to her autobiography and the jobs she has held alongside her practice.
Several artists in 'Salon' approach the figure through ecstatic or intimate terms. Susie Hamilton’s 2026 series 'Plumpers' takes its title from a men’s magazine and imagines women in states of ecstasy, with the gallery describing her use of mess as an “ecstatic method of painting” that disrupts finished images. Helen Beard’s paintings and needlework are presented as celebrations of erotic experience, with sinuous brushstrokes and wool stitching used to emphasize “comfort, connection and pleasure.” Susannah Baker-Smith’s photographs, meanwhile, are described as creating tactile and visual dialogues between objects and images, and as exploring what it means to be “naked” and free from conscious factors while confronting fear, beauty and loss.
The exhibition also brings in myth, folklore and landscape. Lauren Bryden’s monoprints, grouped under 'Ways of Dreaming', draw on Scottish folklore and the figure of Beira, the Queen of Winter, with figures and landscapes merging and dividing across the works. The gallery says Bryden is interested in the expansion of different worlds and the mysticism around plants and their association with women healers. Donna McLean contributes uncanny interior and landscape scenes, using contrasts of light and dark to create what the gallery calls an appealing but unsettling imagery that is both seductive and disarming.
'Salon' also reunites a series of Grace O'Connor’s black-and-white pencil drawings from 2015. Paul Stolper says the drawings intertwine recollections of the American landscape, people and real-life situations while referencing the fictionalisation of memory. The gallery adds that the works have a surreal atmosphere intended to take viewers far away, and notes that proceeds from the sale of Grace O'Connor’s works in the show go directly to her children.
The exhibition is on view at Paul Stolper, 31 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH, with gallery hours Monday to Friday from 10am to 6pm and Saturday from 11am to 6pm. A private view is listed for Tuesday 30 June from 6 to 8pm, and the show continues until 14 August 2026.
