Response to a Request (or spasm of the soul)
Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market
Curated by Brian Griffiths
1st May – 14th June 2026
Part of the sixth edition of London Gallery Weekend: 5th – 7th June 2026 Private View: 30th April 2026
Artists: Judith Dean, Gina Fischli, Nicola Gunnarsson, Sebastian Jefford, Sarah Jones, Richard Kirwan, Hamish Pearch, Cathie Pilkington, Max Prus, Elinor Stanley, Oliver Tirré, Chris Thompson, David Thorpe, Francis Upritchard, and Robert Walser.
Response to a Request (or spasm of the soul) brings together paintings, drawings, sculptures and text that consider what happens when artistic production is shaped by pressures that are not always fully articulated. Rather than resolving the request placed upon them, the works in the exhibition absorb it, sometimes misinterpreting or even pushing against it. Curated by Brian Griffiths, the exhibition examines the space between instruction and impulse, extending his longstanding interest in the artist as an unreliable narrator and exhibition-making as staged and provisional.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a 1907 story by the Swiss writer Robert Walser (translated from German by Christopher Middleton), which is also included in the show. Walser’s Response to a Request fulfils its duty – but only obliquely, unfolding into a set of instructions in which politeness becomes evasion, and hesitation becomes form. The “request” of the title is never named. It may signal a condition in which expectations – whether institutional, social, or internalised – precede the work, making art a discipline that can never quite discipline itself.
The works in this exhibition consider what follows when a response to a request is not a clear answer but something that carries little more than a trace of what provoked it, occupying the threshold between what is asked and what actually happens. Curator Brian Griffiths notes, “The gap between request and response is a space worth inhabiting – one that keeps things open and demands a different kind of involvement.”
The exhibition proposes a model of art that is quietly resistant to clarity of purpose. It suggests that excess, awkwardness, ambiguity, and over‑attention are structural conditions of making. Vagueness is a strategy rather than a deficit; gestures lean toward theatricality, where exaggerated action is a sign of sincerity, and involuntary flickers surface just before the moment meaning arrives to restore order. Here, a “spasm of the soul” is nothing but a twitch: a response that arrives at the wrong time, and in the wrong colour.
For this exhibition, the gallery will be lit with domestic lighting, as with Walser’s text the everyday and the dramatic are carefully orchestrated.
Underplayed and emphatic in equal measure, Response to a Request (or spasm of the soul) examines how artworks respond to demands that are rarely stated outright, even as there remains the expectation to clarify, justify, or resolve. It proposes that misalignment and incompletion are not always deficiencies to be corrected, and that the most honest gesture may be the one that interrupts itself.
The artworks in the exhibition embrace this approach through very different means, for example:
Cathie Pilkington’s sculptural assemblages gather in floor arrangements and compact groupings. Monumental references are flattened into ornamental or precarious forms; figures and animals sag, lean or collapse. Authority is undercut through material play, as if the work resists fully stabilising into its assigned role.
Francis Upritchard’s John (2010) reclines on a tartan blanket whose pattern repeats across his painted body, as if he has been absorbed into its surface. Nearby, a collection of leather ears (2018) are pierced and adorned like cherished keepsakes. Their detachment makes this intimacy odd: they have been loved, just not worn.
Chris Thompson’s Human Femur (enlarged) (2025) wedges an oversized bone into the gallery architecture. Cracked open, bolted together and filled with pebble dash, the sculpture foregrounds repair as both structural and aesthetic move. Its scale is insistent, yet its surface resists polish, holding tension between care and absurdity.
In Elinor Stanley’s You Do Not Do (2026), a dark hand presses down on a pale body. The compressed viewpoint destabilises orientation, making scale and position uncertain. The painting captures a moment of pressure without clarifying its source, suspending the body beneath a force that exceeds it.
Max Prus’ Two Everlasting Doors (2024) presents a pair of ordinary doors opening onto contrasting realities. The familiar holds its shape just long enough to make the rupture feel strange.
Gina Fischli’s Sculpture Ruth (2024) depicts a dog poised somewhere between instinct and training. This white, roughly wrapped form with uneven legs gives this creature a tentative, emotional and unstable presence.
Sebastian Jefford’s drawings populate the space with figures that appear infantilised and exhausted. Within these cartoon-like narratives, even moments of imaginative escape feel constrained, and violence unfolds in a subdued, matter-of-fact way rather than as spectacle.
This exhibition is part of the sixth edition of London Gallery Weekend, 5th – 7th June 2026. On 6th and 7th June, the short story Response to a Request (1907) by Robert Walser will be read on the hour, every hour, throughout Saturday and Sunday. All artists in the exhibition have been invited to read the text. Each reading will be followed by a request or a response.
The curator, Brian Griffiths, will be present awaiting queries, prompts, appeals and solicitations.
Notes to Editors
Judith Dean (born 1965, Billericay, UK). Lives and works in London.
Dean graduated from Wimbledon School of Art in London with a BA honours in Fine Art (1988) and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (1993). Completing numerous residencies, Dean has also received several awards, including the Jerwood Sculpture Prize (2005). Since her first solo exhibition in 1990, Dean has exhibited and performed worldwide, including Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1997). Last year, Dean presented the solo exhibition, New Builds / Bilds 2: did you mean peace?, at South Parade Gallery, London.
Gina Fischli (born 1989, Zurich, Switzerland). Lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
Fischli received her MFA from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2018 and her BA from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Germany, in 2015. Since Fischli has exhibited internationally, including at Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland; the Geneva Biennale: Sculpture Park at Parc des Eaux-Vives, Geneva, Switzerland; Istituto Svizzero, Rome, Italy; Swiss Institute, New York City, and Aspen Art Museum, Colorado. After publishing Bad Timing in 2018, Fischli has published her second monograph, Good Service, in 2022. The artist’s most recent solo exhibition, The Ballad of the Sad Café, was on display at Zazà, Milan, Italy.
Nicola Gunnarsson (born 1995, London, UK). Lives and works in London.
Gunnarsson graduated with a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2017, and with a Fine Art postgraduate from the Royal Academy Schools in 2022. The same year, Gunnarson held her first solo exhibition, Material Girls at Loveday & Co., London. Exhibiting across the UK, Italy and the United States, Gunnarsson received the 2023 Xenia Creative Residency award. In 2025, Gunnarsson opened Post-Fair, a solo exhibition at Roland Ross, Santa Monica, California.
Sebastian Jefford (born 1990, Swansea, Wales). Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2017, Jefford’s work has been exhibited internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. Select exhibitions include Toy at Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, Germany (2025); The Living World of Animals at Gianni Manhattan in Vienna, Austria (2023); and in the same year, Amid the Alien Corn was showcased at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany. In 2022, Jefford presented works in DES CHAMPS DE FRAISES POUR L’ÉTERNITÉ at La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, France, and a group show held at Rob Tufnell in Venice, Italy. In 2021, the artist participated in Frieze London with a solo presentation by Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, Austria, and presented his solo exhibition Natural Gas at Liebaert Projects in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Sarah Jones
Sarah Jones is best in brief.
Richard Kirwan (born 1969).
Kirwan graduated in 1994 with an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Fine Art from Brighton Polytechnic (1992). Kirwan’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with presentations in Australia, Japan, Singapore, the USA, and throughout Europe. In 2012, Kirwan’s work was included in The Indiscipline of Painting, an exhibition at Tate St Ives that explored international abstraction from the 1960s to the present. Recently, Kirwan presented a solo exhibition, In order of appearance, at Lungley Gallery, London. Collected by private collections worldwide, Kirwan’s work is included in the Saatchi Collection, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Groucho, London; Soho House & Co., London; Paul Smith, London; National Art Collection Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy; Ulster Museum of Contemporary Art, Ireland; and Sharjah Museum of Contemporary Art, Dubai.
Hamish Pearch (born 1993, London, UK). Lives and works in London.
After graduating from Camberwell College of Arts, London, Pearch completed a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2019. A finalist for the XL Caitlin Prize in 2016, Pearch was awarded the Fluxus Art Projects grant in 2020 for the solo exhibition Head Above Water at Belsunce Projects, Marseille, France. Completing residencies worldwide, including a residency at Launch Pad LaB, La Boissière, France and Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan, in 2024, Pearch was selected by Frances Morris for a residency at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset. Exhibiting internationally, selected solo exhibitions include Do not throw trash into the pond at Sans titre, Paris (2024); Smoky, Moth and Mike at Ginny on Frederick, London (2023); and If things were different at Galeria Mascota, Mexico City (2022). Pearch previously exhibited with Elizabeth Xi Bauer in The Garden of Unearthly Delights, alongside Theodore Ereira-Guyer and Manuela Ribadeneira in 2021.
Cathie Pilkington (born 1968, Manchester, UK). Lives and works in London.
Pilkington studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1991) and the Royal College of Art (1997).
The recipient of numerous awards, Pilkington was honoured with the Sunny Dupree Award in 2014 for her work, Reclining Doll. A Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools, Pilkington was appointed Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, a post she continues to hold. Exhibiting internationally, select solo exhibitions include Rag & Bone at Kunstmuseum Brandts, Denmark (2025–26), and Weird Horses at Karsten Schubert, London (2023). Recent situated projects include Housekeeper (2025) at the Freud Museum, London; Anatomy of a Doll in the Royal Academy Life Room, London (2016); and Life Room: Working from Home (2019); which made interventions in the display of the permanent collections of Dorich House Museum and Pallant House Gallery. Pilkington’s work is held in worldwide collections, including Pallant House Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery, Hunterian, Glasgow University, Ӧmer Koç Foundation, and the David and Indrė Roberts Art Collection Foundation.
Max Prus (born 1987, Reading, UK). Lives and works in London.
Prus graduated from The Glasgow School of Art (2011) and the Royal Academy Schools (2015). He has completed various international residencies, including La Générale, France; 1Shanthi Road, India; Art Students League of New York, USA; Dover Arts Club Drawing Room Residency, London; and Lake Como Residency, Malevich, Italy. Widely exhibited across England and Mexico, Prus’ work was included in the Day of the Dead group exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2018). Select solo exhibitions include The Long Wait at Somers Gallery, London (2024); Their Garden City at England & Co. Gallery, London (2024); and how many watts? at Cornucopia Gallery, London, (2021).
Elinor Stanley (born 1992, London, UK). Lives and works in London.
Stanley studied at the Royal Academy Schools (2023) and is an alumnus of The Glasgow School of Art (2015) and Open School East, Margate (2018). Following recent international residencies, including Dragon Hill, France (2025), Stanley will undertake a residency with the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA) later this year. Select exhibitions include The Centre Will not Hold at FT2 Gallery, Milan; A Room Hung with Thoughts, British Painting Now at The Green Family Foundation, Dallas, USA; Orbital at Nova Contemporary, Bangkok, Thailand; Chin Chin at Dasein Gallery, Shenzhen, China; and Accordion Fields at Lisson Gallery, London. Later this year, You Must Change Your Life will present works by Stanley at Grimm Gallery in New York City.
Oliver Tirré (born 1989, Nuneaton, UK). Lives and works in London.
Tirré holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools (2019) and a BA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University (2012). A regular participant in artists’ talks across the UK, Tirré has also completed residencies in the UK, the Netherlands, and China. Exhibiting in both Europe and the UK, recent select exhibitions include Governmental Fires, Futura, Prague; Attitudes of the Unruly, Den Frie Udstilling, Copenhagen; and Analogue of a Straight Line, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
Chris Thompson (born 1991, Teesside, UK). Lives and works in London.
Thompson studied in the United States at Cleveland College of Art and Design and SUNY Purchase (State University of New York), and in the UK at Camberwell College of Arts, and holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2023). The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Thompson was honoured with the Developing Your Creative Practice Grant by Arts Council England (2022) and, recently, the Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Award in 2024. Exhibiting extensively throughout the UK, Thompson’s work, The Vessel, is a continuously touring self-contained show, previously exhibited at Goldsmiths, University of London; St Chad’s, London; Middlesbrough Art Week Festival; and PINK MCR, Manchester.
David Thorpe (born 1972, London, UK). Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Thorpe holds a BA Honours in Fine Art from the University of Lincoln (previously Humberside University) and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1998). Since his first solo in 1999 with Maureen Paley, London, Thorpe has exhibited internationally in both gallery and museum spaces, including The Colonists at Tate Britain. Recent solo exhibitions include We have come to display but may come back to destroy, Casey Kaplan, New York, USA, and Underground, Maureen Paley, London, UK. A Perfume Against the Sulphurous Stink of the Snuffe, of the Light for Smoak, published by Kunstverein Hannover, Germany, is Thorpes’s latest artist book. Thorpe’s works are held in private and public collections, including Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Germany; Museum Kurhaus, Kleve, Germany; Saatchi Collection, London; Tate Britain, London; Zabludowicz Collection, London; The Albright Knox Museum, NY, USA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.
Francis Upritchard (born 1976, Ngāmotu / New Plymouth, Aotearoa / New Zealand). Lives and works in London and Aotearoa / New Zealand.
Upritchard graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Aotearoa / New Zealand (1997). Upritchard’s works have been exhibited worldwide, with select recent solo exhibitions held at Kate MacGarry, London (2025); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2024); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (2022); Christchurch Art Gallery, Aotearoa / New Zealand (2022); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium (2020); Barbican Centre, London, UK (2018); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2014); and Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan (2013). Commissioned for the Sydney Modern Project, Upritchard unveiled Here Comes Everybody in 2022 outside the Naala Badu building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her installations, Save Yourself and Viva Arte Viva, represented Aotearoa / New Zealand in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) respectively.
Other group exhibitions include the Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2023); A Thousand Doors, a collaboration between NEON and Whitechapel Gallery; and Lilliput, New York High Line, New York City, USA (2012). Upritchard’s works are held in numerous public collections across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA.
Brian Griffiths (born 1968, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK). Lives and works in Colchester and London, UK.
Brian Griffiths is an artist, curator, and Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools. Since graduating with an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, in the late 1990s, Griffiths has produced sculptures and installations noted for their overblown theatricality and pathos. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2022.
Griffiths has curated numerous exhibitions, including Coming Soon, Royal Academy Schools, London (2025); So he pulled the right levers and you did the asking, Artlink, Kingston upon Hull, Hull UK City of Culture (2017); Shortcuts & Digressions: Contemporary Sculpture from the Arts Council Collection, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (2013); The Extension, Vilma Gold, London, co‑curated with Alexandre da Cunha (2010); The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man, The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle (2003); and Necessary Enemy, Bart Wells Institute, London (2002).
Griffiths’ first monograph, Crummy Love, was published in 2011 by Walther König.
Response to a Request (or spasm of the soul) will run from 1st May – 14th June 2026, at Elizabeth Xi Bauer’s Exmouth Market location, open Wednesday through to Sunday, 12 – 6 pm or by appointment. A Private View will be held on 30th April 2026, 6 – 8 pm.
