annex14 is pleased to present Limehouse night paintings, a new group of works by British painter Simon Callery (b. 1960, London), completed in 2025. This is the artists’ third solo show with the gallery.

Callery has exhibited his work since the mid 1990’s in galleries and institutions internationally including; Tate Britain, British Museum, London, and recently at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, and Rudolfinum, Prague. His practice, informed by long-term collaboration with field archaeologists, has led to an approach to painting rooted in the language of materiality. The artist is recognised for works that place an emphasis on physicality: he cuts, stains, sews, and layers canvasses to construct paintings that contain spatial depth and open surfaces.

For the Limehouse Night Paintings Callery has turned to the urban environments the site for a new group of works. Limehouse is an historic dockland area of east London located on the Thames along a section of the north bank between Tower Bridge and Canary Wharf. Working at night, and at low tide, the artist laid out numerous lengths of canvas, painted a range of dark toned blacks and browns, on the riverbed where the surface is a deep deposit of broken ceramic, masonry and stone. The canvases were marked and cut into here and then back in the studio, washed, softened and stitched to assemble the body of the painting and the physical features and textural qualities of the internal and external faces and drapes.

“Nothing is more important to me than the experience of a painting,” he explains. “Image is secondary. These works don’t deliver a message; they involve you in an experience and they ask you to slow down.” This exhibition brings together three large paintings, that reveal the traces of both the physicality of the Limehouse riverbed and of the painting process, with two related works on paper.

(Text by Dóra Eötvös)