Monstrous Carbuncle

Hypha presents Monstrous Carbuncle, a group exhibition of four emerging artists: Anna Harding, Lucía Scarselletta, Lee Suh and Nicolaas van de Lande united by shared experiences of precarious living in London. Set within the iconic No. 1 Poultry, the exhibition confronts the complex relationship between architectural vision and vacancy, permanence and repurposing.

The show’s title, Monstrous Carbuncle takes its name from Prince Charles’s infamous 1984 condemnation of a proposed National Gallery extension, a phrase that quickly became a catch-all insult for modern and postmodern architecture in Britain. The term stuck, reflecting a wider discomfort with the bold aesthetics and ambitions of late 20th-century design. It’s an apt title for the exhibition: one that reflects on how architecture carries the weight of past dreams, stylistic shifts and public scrutiny, while also revealing the very real tensions of today’s urban life. Set within 1 Poultry, a striking example of postmodernism designed by James Stirling with ground floor now sitting empty, the exhibition confronts the complex relationship between architectural vision and vacancy, permanence and repurposing.

The work of the four artists explores the built environment as a layered stage where hopeful ideas meet real contradictions. Anna Harding’s Ancestral Flashback paintings imagine and unfold the past, present, and future of specific sites. She focuses on spaces that were once conceived with ambitious modernist visions but are now at a turning point, about to be regenerated. Through painting, she represents traces of the past as ghost-like figures, creating a sense of overlapping time. Lucía Scarselletta employs traditional craft techniques and industrial materials to shift between systems of mass manufacture and intimate, embodied knowledge to explore social structures. Lee Suh’s drawing practice, depicting London clay brick structures torn, readjusted, and reassembled on fragile surfaces such as waxed paper, investigates fluctuating spatial boundaries and land rights, rooted in a real-life boundary dispute. Nicolaas van de Lande constructs simplified compositions using saturated colour and flocked surfaces as symbolic interfaces. His work transforms the complexity of contemporary society into simple, tactile, almost cartoon-like forms that are easy to grasp. His works approach the viewer like a form of tactile play, encouraging the viewers to see contemporary life in new ways.