*OTHER NATURE

Opening at Fitzrovia Gallery during Frieze week, *OTHER NATURE brings together five artists working across painting, drawing and textile art. The exhibition questions inherited ideas about what is natural, proper or permitted in representations of bodies and identities. In the title, the asterisk occupies the place of the missing “M” in Mother Nature, transforming a familiar phrase into a question: who has been allowed to define nature on our behalf?

The exhibition explores how gender, sexuality, history and socially prescribed behaviour might be seen and imagined differently. Established visual traditions are revisited through intimate, irreverent and self-authored representations of human experience. Rather than seeking acceptance within existing conventions, *OTHER NATURE questions their claim to authority altogether: no body, identity or way of living should require permission or justification.

Across *OTHER NATURE, colour is less descriptive than transformative. Acid yellows, electric blues, saturated pinks, bruised mauves and emphatic reds lift familiar bodies and objects out of the everyday and into heightened psychological and imagined worlds. Forms remain similarly unsettled: figures overlap, double and dissolve; bodies merge with flowers; gestures accumulate in searching lines; and intimate objects become proxies for the absent body.

Lucian Freud’s assertion that “everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair” expands portraiture here beyond the depicted face, allowing clothing, grooming tools, flowers and domestic objects to carry histories of desire, self-fashioning and lived experience. Together, the works approach utopia not as a perfected destination, but as a series of provisional spaces: sanctuary, adventure, tenderness, ritual and transformation, where identity can remain unfinished and ordinary life can be imagined otherwise.

Participating artists

Roxana Halls is an award-winning London-based figurative painter. Employing wry humour and potent glamour to foreground unsettling narratives, her paintings resist passive spectatorship through their febrile interplay of class, queerness, erotics, performance, agency and refusal. Halls’s solo exhibitions include her first institutional solo exhibition at Haus Kunst Mitte, Berlin, and an exhibition at the National Theatre, London. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in the permanent collections of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Science Museum, London. Her portrait of Pam Hogg was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2025 and the Laing Art Gallery in 2026. She has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Only Artists and Woman’s Hour.

Curtis Holder is a London-based artist whose drawing practice is shaped by an enduring interest in people. Working primarily in graphite and coloured pencil, he creates large-scale portraits and figurative works through close observation and conversation. Each drawing becomes a record of shared experience, built from thousands of accumulated marks that trace presence and the passage of time. Holder’s work is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and Soho House. He won Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year in 2020, received the John Ruskin Prize in 2024 and was awarded a residency at Yaddo, New York, in 2025.

Casper Hong is a Taiwanese artist and spatial designer based in London. His practice explores queer identity, intimacy, memory and belonging through fragmented representations of the body. Combining figurative imagery with botanical forms and layered materials, his work examines the relationships between body, identity and place. His recent work brings embroidery directly into painting, allowing thread, petals and skin to intersect across the surface. Hong’s work has been exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and the UK Embassy of Mexico, as well as exhibitions in London, Norwich and Lisbon.

Kevin Kane is a London-based Scottish artist whose work explores human relationships and challenges societal conventions surrounding identity, desire and intimacy. Primarily working in oil and acrylic painting, he also uses sculpture, printmaking, moving image and installation to extend his interest in the human figure. Kane recently completed a BA in Contemporary Portraiture and has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, the Scottish Portrait Awards and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.

Zach Toppin is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates queerness, identity and the intertwined experiences of trans unease and euphoria. Drawing on his own life and the histories of his queer community and ancestors, he explores emotion, gender, desire, longing, sex and love. Clothing, possessions, symbols and relics become tools of self-fashioning and coded expressions of masculinity and queer culture. Through these intimate objects, Toppin constructs portraits and personal narratives in the absence of the physical body, offering glimpses into a private trans life while communicating experiences of care, communion, struggle and transformation.

Exhibition details

*OTHER NATURE

13–24 October 2026

Daily, 12–6pm

Fitzrovia Gallery

139 Whitfield Street

London W1T 5EN

Private view: 12 October 2026, 7–9pm

The exhibition coincides with Frieze London and Frieze Masters.

Press enquiries, images and further information

Kevin Kane

kevin@kevinkaneartist.com