London Gallery Weekend Exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth

Michaela Yearwood-Dan. No Time for Despair
​Hauser & Wirth London ​
​13 May – 2 August 2025

‘Looking at Michaela’s work, you’re left with a sense of boundless possibility.’—Curator Ekow Eshun

Through paintings, sculpture, site-specific murals and installations, Michaela Yearwood-Dan endeavors to build spaces of community, abundance and joy. Yearwood-Dan’s debut exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will take place in London, featuring new paintings ranging from monumental to intimate in scale, including an expansive 11 meter-long panelled landscape painting, alongside richly adorned, ceramic sculptures and benches. The lyrical quality of the paintings will be complemented by a new sound piece made in collaboration with the composer Alex Gruz. ​

Yearwood-Dan’s unique visual language draws on a diverse range of influences, including Blackness, queerness, femininity and healing rituals. Moving freely between media and resisting any singular definition of identity, the artist explores the possibilities of creating spaces—physical, pastoral, metaphorical—that allow for unlimited and unbounded ways of being.

Lush and brightly hued, Yearwood-Dan’s work is at once personal and political. She often engages colors and materials for their symbolic associations, such as ceramic petals collaged into her recent paintings that evoke the queer histories of carnations and pansies. The surfaces of her canvases are dense with generous swathes of lavish pigments and textures, with intricate embellishments using subversive and non-traditional materials such as gold leaf, Swarovski crystals, sequins and glitter. Language intertwines with botanical motifs throughout the work, where abstract habitats teem with painted plant life, alongside inscribed lines of text pulled from song lyrics, poetry or her own diaristic writings. Her words beckon the viewer into a vivid, welcoming world of paradox, play and contemplation formed within an atmosphere of swirling forms and brilliant chromaticity.

Paul McCarthy. Outside is Inside, Inside is Outside. God is Dog. Dog is God
​Hauser & Wirth London ​
​5 June – 2 August 2025

One of the leading contemporary American artists of his generation, Paul McCarthy has developed a distinct and subversive artistic practice throughout his long career, which now spans more than five decades.

In this exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, McCarthy will construct an installation within the North Gallery, utilizing a disused theater set as a location for drawing, digital recording and AI interaction. This format is part of a trajectory in McCarthy’s work going back to the 1960s of drawing and painting as action or performance.

The exhibition will display a continuation of themes explored in improvised performances between artist Paul McCarthy and German actor Lilith Stangenberg entitled ‘Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve,’ a satirically uncompromising oeuvre. This project reflects McCarthy’s lifelong exploration of bodily abjection, human entanglement, power, Hollywood and the underbelly of the 20th- and 21st-Century’s cultural and political climate. The works on view will serve as documentation of both McCarthy’s incisive critical lens and his practice of synthesizing performance, film, painting, drawing, sculpture and sound.

A unique artist’s book documenting artist Paul McCarthy and Lilith Stangenberg’s acclaimed performance piece, ‘Paul McCarthy: A&E, ADOLF & EVA, ADAM & EVE, DEAD END HOLE, PICNIC,’ will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers on 15 April 2025.

Press Contacts:

Alice Haguenauer, alicehaguenauer@hauserwirth.com, +44 7880 421 823
​Manisha Bhogal, manishabhogal@hauserwirth.com, +44 7917 075313

^{Copyright and Courtesy Credits:}

^{Michaela Yearwood-Dan in her studio, 2024. Photo: Ollie Adegboye. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth}

^{Michaela Yearwood-Dan, We'll be free (Sunday), 2025, Oil, paper and glass beads on plastic and canvas, 240 x 200 cm / 94 1/2 x 78 3/4 in © Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Photo: Deniz Guzel}

^{Paul McCarthy ‘A&E Drawing Session, Santa Anita’, performance still, 2021. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth}

^{© Paul McCarthy. Photo: Mara McCarthy, 2001. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth}