The first thing you notice when you walk into the exhibition Things Left Unsaid is that the space is not a conventional white-walled gallery, but the iconic Frevd (pronounced Freud) in central London. A gathering place for London's creative scenes since the late 1980s, Frevd has attracted local artists, musicians, thinkers to their venue for rotating art shows, music events, and cocktails in an industrial Bohemian style setting. Surprisingly, Things Left Unsaid, curated by Inku Sphere, marks the first group exhibition in Frevd’s 40-year history, transforming the bar into an exhibition space between September 14th and October 14th 2025.
At the private view, when I first saw the show, the venue was packed, as I later learned, with over 280 visitors. I found myself wandering around, exploring each part of the space - paintings and photographs hung both high and low, installations and sculptures were woven throughout the space.
As the title of the show may suggest, the show is about the things that resist the urge to define - objects and experiences that don't require words, and that rebel against the modern world's demand for certainty and instant legibility. In the curator's own words, the show creates a "room where the unsaid is not a lack but a method”.
The show brings together an array of 24 artists, some veterans of the local art scene and some newcomers - Mark Purllant, Yishi, Millie Chen, Shuyang Chen, Kuan Yu Chou, Xuran Guo, Shan Lyu, Mudai, Yunny Qu, Yung-Hsiang Chou, Xinyi Liu, Yihan Pan, Paula Parole, Xufei Qiao, Anning Song, Ziyi Yan, Anna Candlin, Wanting Wang, Xiaoping Yu, Jiawen Zhang, Tianle Zhao, Yingying Zheng, Weihang Zhu, Yiming Zhu.
It's impossible to separate the artworks from the space itself. With the theme in mind, I find Frevd a poignant and thoughtful setting for the staging of the exhibition. The energy of the bar contrasts with artworks that choose to whisper instead of shout, that resist easy definitions.
At the back of the ground floor space stood Mark Purllant's towering 2.2m tall sculpture, The uncertainty of the present, Sculpture No.1. The artwork is made of strips of rolled steel bending in elliptical forms, with two large glass flower bulbs at the bottom made in collaboration with glass blower David Flower. On top sits another abstract organic form that recalls the shape of a butterfly. In a way, I find the work reminiscent of some of Kandinsky's more organic shapes, only in 3D form.
In an Instagram video, Purllant mentions how his practice is about the line between chaos and order. And as the title of his work suggests, there may be a thin line in our present moment between the two. Kandinsky has stated "the more frightening the world becomes... the more art becomes abstract". In the context of this show, Purllant's abstract forms embody that. What is abstracted, inaudible, or mysterious becomes almost an antidote to the modern world.
In the basement level of the show, hung an illuminated green screen object - GreenScreen by Anna Candlin. During the private view, I was immediately drawn to its silent mystery, shrouded in a dark corner of the exhibition space. The patchy surface of the green screen is made of biomaterials and is attached to an irregular grid of thin branches and e-waste cables. The screen glows with a backside projection of Candlin's video work Sentience, describing hybrid human and plant beings. The projection of the video activates the art object, giving the static sculpture a sense of bioluminescent aliveness.
In Candlin's words, she says the work implicates that "human detritus has infiltrated the DNA of plants". She hopes to blur the divide between human and nature, to perhaps say that determining what is natural or unnatural is not so simple and requires deeper reflection.
Where Candlin's work layers meaning through material complexity, Yishi's painting Two Horses demonstrates how directness can carry equal power. The work depicts two horses, one white and one brown, in a tender neck embrace over a simple but textured pink background. Its simplicity exudes a sense of care and warmth without needing any additional layers or language. It's a reminder that sometimes what is unspoken, and perhaps without human language itself, is sometimes the loudest, if you listen close enough.
It's hard not to notice a slight nature theme to the show, intentional or otherwise. Beyond Purllant's glass flowers, Candlin's bio-sculptures, and Yishi's depiction of animal life, there were a few others that fit this theme. Ziyi Yan's painting The Bloom of Boundaries depicts a cell-like organism inspired by speculative biology, Xufei Qiao painted Cat in the Night No. 0 and No.5, features two cats lounging in the dark of a bustling city, and Still by Yingying Zheng, shows two abstracted trees swaying in the breeze against a blue sky.
To me, this speaks to the fact that it is the natural world that represents "what is left unsaid" the best. The natural world has no need to perform or draw attention to itself. Its memory is slow and outlasts language. Nature often seems to be one of the only reprieves from the cacophony of modern urban life. In the context of the exhibition space, the subtle references to the natural world work well. Frevd acts as an oasis in the larger context of central London. The curators state that Frevd is:
"a space that does not shout for attention, but carries the quiet traces of time in its walls and corners. These traces remind us: silence and restraint are not absence, but another form of presence”.
In the busyness of modern London life, what's most loud, most visible and immediate is often what gets noticed. Things Left Unsaid manages to capture what gets ignored in this culture - works that are slow, that go overlooked, that are deeper than surface level "content".
