2025 Commissions Programme

Chisenhale Gallery was founded by artists. The same experimental vision and spirit of possibility that changed an empty veneer factory into an art gallery guides our work today. We commission new works of art, supporting artists at every stage of project development, from concept to completion. The gallery has an award winning four-decade history as one of London’s most innovative spaces for contemporary art. As we build on this rich and varied legacy, we continue to place artists at the centre of everything we do.

In 2025, Chisenhale Gallery presents three new commissions by artists Claudia Pagès Rabal, Dan Guthrie, and Grant Mooney. All working in response to site, these artists exercise a sensitivity toward social, political, and material histories that continue to shape our surroundings and relation to the world. As part of the commissioning process, talks and events are developed with each artist to amplify ideas underpinning their practice, while generating spaces of exchange and participation. 

Claudia Pagès Rabal
February 28–May 11, 2025 
Opening: February 27, 2025 

Claudia Pagès Rabal’s practice intertwines words, bodies, music, and movement. She examines structures of containment that facilitate the flow of commodities and capital. Recent works have centred histories of waterways, paper, and legislative language. Continuing her research across the Iberian Peninsula during the Al-Andalus era, Pagès’ new body of work turns towards sites of defence across its borderlands. For her Chisenhale Gallery commission, Pagès maps the rhythms and recurrences of sites of resistance. Five defence towers built under the Hispanic March—a military buffer zone established by European forces in the 9th and 10th centuries—become the protagonists for a new moving-image work. Choreographed sequences of dance, light, and sound will trace forms of self-defence, and map the ways colonial practices of erasure persist through time. 

Dan Guthrie 
June 6–August 17, 2025 
Opening: June 5, 2025 

Dan Guthrie is an artist who often works with moving images to explore representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness, with a particular interest in examining how these manifest themselves in rural areas. Guthrie’s Chisenhale Gallery commission continues a long-term engagement with the Blackboy Clock, an object of contested heritage publicly displayed in the artist’s hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire. Two new videos put forward the “radical un-conservation” of the clock; a new theoretical term proposed by Guthrie to describe the act of acquiring an object with the intention of destroying it. A new online platform that indexes the clock’s timeline, from its historical origins to ongoing debates related to its future, will launch at earf.info. Questions of what we memorialise and how we do so sit at the centre of this new body of work, produced and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol. 

Grant Mooney 
September 26–December 7, 2025 
Opening: September 25, 2025 

Occupying intermediary positions among abstract, autonomous, and site-specific, Grant Mooney’s sculpture has an acute concern for tactility and connectivity, while straddling associations of studio craft, material history, and site-responsive gesture. Informed by foundational metalsmithing techniques and a knowledge of metal alloys, his works examine sensory and physical states, and the frictions and alchemies at play within. For his Chisenhale Gallery commission, Mooney will explore a series of material behaviours that interact with the immediate environment and infrastructure of the gallery’s building. 

Chisenhale Gallery is a registered charity and part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. All of our exhibitions are free.

The 2025 Commissions Programme is produced with support from the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Fund and within the Call of ”la Caixa” Foundation Support for Creation’24. Production.

Lead Supporter: The Foundation Foundation. 

Headline Supporter: Henry Moore Foundation.

The 2025–26 Asymmetry Curatorial Research Fellow is hosted by Chisenhale Gallery.

Chisenhale Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition License to Live by Bruno Zhu will be on view from November, 22 2024 – February, 2 2025.  

For further information please contact: T +44 (0)20 8981 4518 / media [​at​] chisenhale.org.uk