Our critic’s choice of London Gallery Weekend shows: South

The spotlight turns on south London on 5 June where young artists are getting their debut shows and veterans of the Venice Biennale are making a comeback by Louisa Buck.

Check out The Art Newspaper’s guide to London Gallery Weekend for recommendations on the best exhibitions to see during the three-day event, top trends and commentary

Once a far-flung outpost populated by only the intrepid few, south London is now a fully-fledged, contemporary art hub as is evidenced by the 20 south-of-the-river galleries taking part in London Gallery Weekend. It is a dispersed scene, stretching from Battersea to Deptford, and taking in a swathe of public spaces, from the South Bank Centre to Tate Modern and down to the expanded South London Gallery and Goldsmith’s CCA. But whether it’s White Cube’s cavernous Bermondsey hangar, Cabinet’s bijou building in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens or Sundy, which operates out of a terraced house in Elephant and Castle, south London’s galleries cater for all tastes and budgets.

Jade Montserrat: In Search of our Mother’s Gardens

5 June-24 July, Bosse & Baum, Unit BGC Bussey Building, 133 Rye Lane, SE15 4ST

Artist-activist Jade Montserrat’s first solo show at Bosse & Baum consists of works on paper and wall hangings spanning from 2014 to this year. Many of these are based on fragmented and/or pixelated images of bodies originating with the artist’s own, which are the source of coded messages and visual play. Human and plant forms merge and bodies are blended with the contours of various rural landscapes, including the Caribbean and West Africa as well as the North Yorkshire moors where Montserrat grew up. The show’s title comes from Alice Walker’s text that identifies Black women’s bodies as shaped and ravished by the legacy of colonial atrocity, but here physical, female forms are also presented as part of a larger, interconnected whole.