Vestiges | Annely Juda Fine Art
Vestige, from the Latin vestigium: a footprint, a visible sign of something that once existed but is now gone. Vestiges is a grab-bag summer group show at Annely Juda, five artists whose works may be said to contain such signs.
Of the five, I liked Laura Footes best. Her scenes are all recognisably from London, though blurred with overlays. Annely Juda is showing two pairs of her paintings. The first shows the city’s double decker buses, one view from the bottom floor, one from the top.
I take the 25 and the 205 down Whitechapel Road most weeks. Footes’ version of that same scene is slightly hallucinatory, the central figure semi-transparent, revealing the receding City skyscrapers in the rear window behind her. It’s familiar and disorienting
Night Gardens II (2026)
The second pair of paintings is aerial views of residential gardens at night. Creeping overgrowth around flimsy wooden fences. Illuminated extensions. Harsh streetlight on the roads. A bruise-coloured sky above it all.
She catches the vestiges of a passing moment, certainly. These moments are admittedly conventional, familiar, even banal for any Londoner, or maybe even any city-dweller. But sometimes that capture is all you can ask of an artist.
Vestiges is at Annely Juda Fine Art (London). 23 July - 28 August 2026