London Gallery Weekend, 2026. Response to a Request (or spasm of the soul)

Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market, presents the group exhibition, Response to a Request (or spasm of the soul), curated by Brian Griffiths. Exhibiting works by 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. The exhibition examines the space between instruction and impulse, extending Griffiths’ 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. 

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. A request or a response will follow each reading.  

The curator, Brian Griffiths, will be present awaiting queries, prompts, appeals and solicitations.