A new curatorial platform called Clarissa launched during Frieze Week in London, staged across three levels of a former club and sex shop in King's Cross. Organized by the team behind Émergent Magazine in collaboration with Soft Commodity, the group show features a mix of established and emerging artists including Michael Dean, Hilary Lloyd, Tobias Spichtig, Joel Wycherley, Remi Ajani, and Tiago Francez. The exhibition draws on the history of the regenerated King's Cross area to explore how contemporary art can inhabit and provoke urban change.
Clarissa matters because it represents a new model for curatorial practice that deliberately ignores traditional art world hierarchies between blue-chip and emerging artists. As a roving series that will travel between cities aligned with major art calendar events, it challenges established market categories and prioritizes intuitive artistic dialogue over commercial status. The show's location in a former sex shop and its support from multiple galleries including Arcadia Missa, Brunette Coleman, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, and Ginny on Frederick signals a growing trend of alternative, magazine-led curatorial platforms that operate outside conventional gallery structures.