Vardaxoglou

About the Gallery
Established by Alex Vardaxoglou in 2020, Vardaxoglou is a London-based gallery specialising in modern and contemporary art. The gallery’s programme features exhibitions with a number of contemporary artists in the context of regular historical surveys that present pioneering artists of the twentieth century.

Vardaxoglou has presented the first solo exhibitions in London by Lewis Brander, Tanoa Sasraku, Kentaro Okumura, and Niamh O’Malley following her representing Ireland at 59th Venice Biennale. In 2024 Vardaxoglou presented the first solo exhibition in ten years by Thérèse Oulton, the first woman to be nominated for the Turner Prize.

In addition to working with living artists, Vardaxoglou represents the Estate of Robyn Denny, one of a group of artists who transformed British art in the 1960s and 70s. Vardaxoglou also works with the Estate of Richard Smith, one of the most influential artists of his generation, and in 2023 opened an exhibition of unseen kite paintings by Richard Smith. In the same year Vardaxoglou presented a survey exhibition on Howard Hodgkin’s portraits of artists, supported by the Estate of Howard Hodgkin.

Vardaxoglou is also active in publishing regular exhibition literature, artist’s books, monographs, texts, and special editions, on occasion of particular exhibitions and artist projects, which are all available to view at the gallery and often include contributions from prominent writers, curators, and art historians.

The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11am-5pm, during exhibitions.

About the Presentation
Vardaxoglou will present work by Kentaro Okumura at Independent. Working through a visual language of simplified signs, symbols, forms, and colour, Okumura creates paintings that hover between the physical and the metaphysical. Concrete imagery dissolves into gesture, and gesture solidifies into symbol. Images slip between literal and metaphorical readings, becoming translations of experience rather than direct depictions.

The presentation brings together paintings shaped by memory, travel, and lived experience, drawing from journeys across Europe, North Africa, Latin America, Asia, and beyond. Across Okumura’s paintings, landscapes become bodily and interiors open onto coastlines, while symbols emerge and dissolve. Rooted in Athens yet shaped by movement across geographies, Okumura’s paintings operate as vessels of translation in which memory, sensation, and place converge into a singular, shifting language.