This Must Be the Place: Artists for Whitechapel Gallery

This Must Be the Place is a special exhibition and sale developed in collaboration with artists and their galleries to mark Whitechapel Gallery's 125th anniversary and help support its future. Since opening its doors in East London in 1901, the Gallery has introduced its many audiences to groundbreaking artists and practices from across the globe, ensuring its role as a vital barometer and shaper of contemporary culture. This Must Be the Place continues that legacy by bringing together twenty-four international artists whose distinctive works are defining the present moment. Exclusively presented in the Gallery's historic Assembly Room – site of the former Whitechapel Library – are newly commissioned or recent works from: Remi Ajani, Oliver Bak, Nicholas Bierk, Tim Breuer, Gareth Cadwallader, Andrew Cranston, Simone Kennedy Doig, Nat Faulkner, Lenz Geerk, Brett Goodroad, Sky Glabush, Jake Grewal, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Esme Hodsoll, Mia Kokkoni, Aaron Kudi, Shigeo Otake, Marc Prats-Quintana, Giangiacomo Rossetti, Shiwen, Ellen Siebers, Laurie Smith, Rafał Topolewski, and Arisa Yoshioka. All the artists share a commitment to painting as a practice. Taking both figurative and abstract approaches, they position the image not as a fixed statement but as a space of enquiry, where meaning is built through attention to surface, material, gesture and time. Many of the works in the exhibition resist the speed and immediacy of contemporary image culture. Instead, they invite a slower encounter, with content and meaning revealed gradually through layers of paint, accumulated marks, shifts of perspective and visual ambiguity. All works are offered for sale, with proceeds directly supporting Whitechapel Gallery, the artists and their representative galleries.