Champagne Reception and Private Viewing
Monday May 11th, 6-8 pm

Opening Event
Tuesday May 12th, 6:30-9 pm

Panel Discussion moderated by Katy Wick
Thursday May 14th, 9:30 - 11 am

Interior Design and Art Panel
Friday May 15th, 10 - 11:30 am

Julia and Pamela in conversation with Naomie Kremer and Carola Dixon
Friday May 15th, 6 - 7:30 pm

Please RSVP to kristina@octaviaartgallery.com
 

Founder of Octavia Art Gallery, New Orleans, Pamela Bryan and London-based curator and art advisor Julia Campbell Carter are proud to co-present Rhythm in the Blues, a dynamic group exhibition at 14 Percy Street, London, taking place from 11 – 20 May.

In a world of geo-political fracture and uncertainty, this exhibition unites and celebrates the creative voices of five acclaimed international contemporary artists each embodying a distinct multiplicity of nationalities, cultures, perspectives and medium – Alia Ali, Aigana Gali, Azadeh Ghotbi, Naomie Kremer, and Lucille Lewin. The exhibition affirms the vital importance of art and multi-disciplinary culture and their impact on how we understand the world and our place within it.
 

The works on view engage in a dynamic dialogue around rhythm, migration, memory, and place, forged through an exchange between New Orleans and London - two cities deeply rooted in layered musical histories. Rhythm in the Blues draws from the cultural and historical legacy of Rhythm and Blues as an art form shaped by movement, resilience, and lived experience. Through repetition, tonal variation, and intuitive form, the artists explore rhythm as both structure and inheritance, reflecting on diaspora, identity, and the transmission of memory. The result is a resonant visual language that invites viewers to not only see but feel the enduring pulse of history.

Alia Ali’s practice draws on Yemeni heritage and is shaped by movement, displacement, and research. Collaborating with Indigenous communities worldwide, her multimedia work engages material traditions and shared systems of knowledge across time and place. Language is central to her practice, understood as embodied beyond speech or text. Through photography, textiles, sculpture, and installation, she explores cultural memory, lived histories, and lineage while examining power and how knowledge is preserved and reimagined. She is a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Global Nikon Ambassador.

For the Georgian-Kazakh painter Aigana Gali, meanwhile, ancient cosmologies such as Tengrism, inform luminous abstract canvases that evoke the vastness, light and mythic landscapes of the Eurasian Steppe. Her work explores colour, spirituality and human connection to nature through expansive, atmospheric forms. Gali’s paintings, shown internationally - including at the Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts - blend intuitive gesture and movement, like a musician improvising with an instrument.

With a practice based on movement and a multiplicity of perspectives, London-based Iranian-American painter and photographer Azadeh Ghotbi explores themes of transience and belonging in stunning, abstract, gestural canvases that are deeply rooted in her unique personal experience and keen sense of observation. Her work aims to foster a deeper understanding and empathy for others. She invites us to pause, reflect, look beyond the surface and reveal the beauty in noticing the unseen.

A suite of abstract oil paintings by Israeli-born American artist Naomie Kremer, with their jagged, geometric forms, create a disorienting perceptual experience, an ambiguous atmosphere inviting the viewer to get lost and allow new, free associations to form in the mind. Although largely abstract, Kremer’s imagery draws from the real world, incorporating references to nature, architecture, language, letterforms and the human figure. Her work is informed by art history, music, poetry, and literature, and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the US Embassy in Beijing, China, among others.

British South African sculptor Lucille Lewin – formerly the founder of Whistles and Creative Director of Liberty – creates works that are fractured metaphors for human experience through time. Her seemingly delicate, poetic pieces are personal and political. She models porcelain clay, dips, slips, casts and throws it before it is cut-up, pressed, extruded, broken and reassembled, a rigorous process of construction and deconstruction, akin to a composer, building her works to a gradual crescendo.

This celebration of bold, borderless creativity is both empowering and enlivening – bringing together distinct yet resonant practices.

Rhythm in the Blues celebrates the power of art as a shared language through which these artists transform rhythm, harmony, sound and ancestral echoes into bold visual expression.