The Shed
The Shed
12th June, 2025 – 26th July, 2025
Bernston Bhattacharjee
45 Berners Street
London
W1T 3NE
The Shed: A Site of Secrets, Shelter, and Subversion
“‘Schudde, hovel, or swyne kote, or howse of sympyl hyllynge to kepe yn beestys’. The shed or hovel is a house fi t for beasts, and millions of spiders would agree.” – 15th Century Dictionary
Bernston Bhattacharjee is pleased to announce the group exhibition, The Shed. Toying with the perverse, hidden desires, and intimate experiences, Szabolcs Bozó, Joe Fox, Cece Philips, Olivia Sterling, Katy Stubbs, Julia Thompson, and Willowfuck find each other in The Shed. Bringing together seven artists whose practices transform this unassuming structure into a site of introspection, narrative, and subversion, each explores its symbolic potential in distinct and unexpected ways.
Oil on wood panel, 80x100cm
Courtesy of Bernston Bhattacharjee
Working across a variety of mediums—including paper, canvas, and sculpture—the artists present a new body of work housed within a constructed shed, situated at the end of an uneven path behind the gallery. This path offers a moment of quiet reflection before entering the structure, where the works reveal secrets and challenge the boundaries of ordinary spectatorship. Inside, the experience becomes personal and introspective, inviting close engagement with both material and conceptual layers. A selection of larger-scale pieces by the artists will be displayed downstairs, offering a broader context to the installation above.
Tracing back to rudimentary architectural origins, the simple form of a shed references the most basic notion of shelter. From refuge to storage, the shed has become an extension of the human impulse to collect and accumulate—a place to harbour unwanted objects, tools, and peculiar, nostalgic items. More than a container, the shed becomes a private space of pondering, where the unseen parts of the self come into view.
Courtesy of Bernston Bhattacharjee
Who are you in The Shed?
With a rich cultural history, artists such as Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread DBE have long embraced the conceptual potential of the shed. Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) reconstructs the remains of a garden shed she commissioned the British Army to destroy—transforming the everyday and challenging institutional constructs both literally and figuratively. Whiteread’s Detached I, II, and III (2012)—concrete and steel casts of shed interiors—invert familiar functions by turning personal spaces into solid, impenetrable monuments. These forms preserve the traces of interior life while denying access, forcing the viewer into the role of distant observer.
Alternatively, Do Ho Suh’s current exhibition Walk The House at Tate Modern explores simple structures on a grander scale, using fabric to memorialize space and time. These artists elevate humble architecture beyond utility, using it as a powerful metaphor for memory, presence, and identity.
Bound by the shed’s quiet visage, the artists in Bernston Bhattacharjee’s exhibition gather in a space where the hidden becomes seen and the ordinary turns uncanny. In their hands, the shed is not just shelter but a threshold between public and private, memory and myth, humour and haunting, where the inner self is no longer concealed, but set free.
The Shed opens on the 12th of June, 2025 until the 26th of July, 2025 at Bernston Bhattacharjee
©2025 Bernston Bhattacharjee
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