Clarissa, a new curatorial platform from Émergent Magazine, launched its first group exhibition during Frieze Week in London. Staged across three levels of a former club and sex shop in King’s Cross, the show features a mix of established and emerging artists—including Michael Dean, Hilary Lloyd, Tobias Spichtig, Joel Wycherley, Remi Ajani, and Tiago Francez—alongside works by Patricia L Boyd, Oscar Enberg, Hamish Pearch, and others. Curated by Reuben Beren James and Albert Riera Galceran in collaboration with the nomadic collective Soft Commodity, the exhibition aims to ignore art-world hierarchies and focus on intuitive dialogues between artists across generations and geographies.
Clarissa matters because it represents a new model for art exhibitions that bridges print and physical space, aligning with key moments on the international art calendar. By drawing on the history of its regenerated King’s Cross location and rejecting blue-chip/emerging distinctions, the show offers a fresh curatorial approach that prioritizes artistic conversation over market categories. Its planned roving series—traveling between cities—could influence how independent magazines and collectives engage with the global art fair circuit.