Judith Godwin

Amar Singh’s eponymous Islington gallery has a simple but laudable ethos, specializing in exhibitions of LGBTQ and female artists with diverse, progressive narratives. Raised in London but a member of the royal Kapurthala family of Punjab, Singh was one of many political campaigners who made up a global coalition that last month recorded a landmark legal victory in India, overturning the country’s 2013 criminalization of gay sex. Now, Amar Gallery is turning to one of the lesser-known histories of art, with an exhibition of the women behind Abstract Expressionism in 1950s and 60s America. Lynne Mapp Drexler, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and myriad others take pride of place in Hiding in Plain Sight, which explores the female painters who have been neglected in favour of their more barnstorming counterparts—the Rothkos, the Pollocks and the Newmans. There’s a pioneering spirit to the paintings, be they the natural blooms Drexler cultivated on her canvases, or the liquid colour-field stains of Helen Frankenthaler, made all the more engrossing by the fact that many of these artists have never been exhibited in the U.K. before.