WHY THESE 14 SHOWS ARE THE ONLY VALENTINES YOU NEED

February is the year’s most convincing simulation of nothingness—a shivering, low-energy void where the gallery becomes the only place left to hide. We aren’t looking for pretty pictures this month; we’re looking for a way to process the friction of existing in a culture that’s permanently in flux. It’s about the messy, unpolished reality of survival, far removed from the sterile high-gloss of the commercial art market.

If you’re tired of the noise and looking for something that actually sticks, here is what’s worth the trip.

Ukraine

1. (post-)System

Jan van Wonseel is digging up a 25-year-old manifesto to prove that all art is just a prisoner of its own system. This Flemish-Ukrainian deep dive into the "dead end" of representation reaches a zero point where we finally stop pretending art can be neatly explained.

2.  Pavlo Makov: EPILOGUE (ПІСЛЯМОВА)

Pavlo Makov is attempting the impossible: a meaningful afterword to an eleven-year creative cycle. This show at The Naked Room functions as the final punctuation mark for his "Abracadabra" project, moving away from his signature precision into an atypical, naturalistic study of plants from his dacha in Kharkiv. It is a meditation on the herbarium as a metaphor for memory, where the image of the plant increasingly resembles a ghost of the living thing. Even his workbook is on display, acting as an unintentional self-portrait of an artist trying to "finish talking" when the words have already run out.

Photo: Pavlo Makov “SELF-PORTRAIT, FROM THE HERBARIUM NOTEBOOK” 2025—2026 paper, colour pencils 37Х35.5 СМ, by Naked Room Gallery

3. Spilne Art x MYPH: Photography Prize 2025

This exhibition is a jarring index of survival, jumping from the hardcore grit of the military front to the surreal, haunted quiet of Austrian tourist infrastructure. It’s a three-part reality check on what "home" and "rear" look like when the borders between them have collapsed.

4. Anna Sapon: With artists, curators by golden sunsets («З художницями, кураторками, золотими заходами сонця»)

Anna Sapon uses tufting, a cozy and domestic craft, to build a manifesto of radical sovereignty and "heavenly beauty." Her carpets are tactile landscapes of golden sunsets and intense feelings, acting as gates to a world that feels significantly more sparkling than our own.

 

Photo: Anna Sapon. A rug on canvas, made using the tufting technique. Photo by Katya Libkind.

5. When I’m in Ukraine, everyone asks me about Poland. When I’m in Poland everyone asks me about Ukraine.

Waldemar Tatarchuk is stepping out from behind the curator’s desk to map his own "movement East" through decades of Polish-Ukrainian solidarity. It’s an intimate look at how political empathy manifests as physical performance, exploring the clandestine bonds that form at the intersection of two cultures.

Tokyo

6. Looking into the Gaps III : Group Exhibition of Ukrainian Contemporary Artists

Curated by Nikita Kadan, this exhibition is a literal hard drive of the Ukrainian "now," featuring works physically carried out of a war zone. It confronts the historical rupture by showcasing artists who cannot leave the context of war - some because they are on the front lines, others because they didn't survive them.

 

Photo: New video work (a part) / Pavlo Kovach

Berlin

7. A Heart That Beats: Focus on Queer Ukrainian Art

This is the first major group show to drag queer Ukrainian history out of the Soviet shadows and into the heat of the current resistance. It’s a three-chapter journey through invisibility and taboo-breaking, proving that queer vibrancy is, and always has been, the indestructible pulse of the community’s identity.

Photo: Alina Kleytman, Serie Bioinstallation_Prosthesis, Kunststoff, Metall, 2023-23, Foto Yasmin Künze (Ansicht 2)

8. Love Is a Losing Game 

Philipp Lange pens a letter to Amy Winehouse to frame a group show that treats love as a series of strategic failures and capitalist traps. The works move from charcoal tracings of masturbation to the kinetic choreography of motorized blinds, suggesting that intimacy is either a digital hallucination or a domestic cage. It is a sharp, cynical look at how we navigate desire in an era where the pop song is the ultimate marketing tool for our own loneliness.

Photo: Flaka Haliti, I Miss You, I Miss You, Till I Don’t Miss You Anymore, 2012–2014 Three-channel video + audio, 113′ loop

London

9. Tracey Emin: A Second Life 

Tracey Emin returns to Tate Modern to prove that the cult of the messy, confessional self still maintains a vice grip on institutional validation. This survey turns her domestic life and personal trauma into a grand, painterly spectacle, navigating the thin line between radical honesty and the commodification of the "authentic" woman. It is a study in how large-scale vulnerability can still function as a weapon against the sterile silence of the museum.

  • Dates: February 27, 2026 – August 31, 2026 

  • Link: Tate Modern

Photo: Tracey Emin The End of Love 2024 Tate Purchased with funds provided by A4 Arts Foundation 2025 © Tracey Emin

10. Catherine Hahn: Queer Along the River

The Victorian gaze was remarkably good at mistaking queer existence for criminal statistics. This exhibition at Deptford Lounge acts as a counter-archive, digging up the working-class LGBTQ+ histories of South London that were buried under 18th-century accounts of poverty. It is a necessary reclamation of the riverfront, using local art to prove that heritage is rarely as sanitized as the official record suggests.

11.  Blitz: The Club That Shaped the 80s

Before subculture became a curated Pinterest board, there was the Blitz. It was a two-year social experiment in high-concept dressing and pop stardom, acting as the aesthetic laboratory for the New Romantics. While not officially a queer space, it functioned as a vital sanctuary for the performative and the avant-garde, proving that the right guest list can rewire the global cultural consciousness.

Photo: Vivienne Lynn, Boy George, Chris Sullivan, Kim Bowen, Theresa Thurmer, and a Blitz attendee, 1980. © Derek Ridgers c/o Unravel Productions

12.  S*x Work Is the Least Interesting Thing About Me

This community-led takeover of The Bath House refuses to play the respectability game, centering the artist’s personhood far beyond the mechanics of labor. It is a multidisciplinary strike against the moralizing noise of a highly politicized industry, questioning who exactly holds the license to define what is "legitimate" and what is merely transactional.

13.  Marina Inoue: Night Thoughts

If your earliest memory is Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic, you likely understand the bedroom as a site of psychological warfare rather than rest. Marina Inoue’s solo exhibition and publication launch in Leeds navigate the seductive dread of 80s and 90s psychosexual thrillers, where moody blue lighting and lacy lingerie signaled imminent menace. It is an exploration of the space between consciousness and sleep, where intrusive thoughts pace the floor like the antagonists of a sleazy, late-night cable film.

Photo: Instagram marina_inoue


14.  Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1880–Today (Part II) 

Surrealism has spent a century acting as a staging ground for the male subconscious, but this exhibition hands the keys to the women and queer artists who actually know how to use them. The show treats the fetish not just as a kink, but as a tactical maneuver to dismantle the boredom of domestic labor and the constraints of traditional identity. It is a passage through paintings and fetishistic sculptures that proves the erotic is most powerful when it is used to rewrite the body entirely.

Dates: Until February 28, 2026 

Link: Richard Saltoun Gallery

Image from the Unveiled Desires II: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery

In a month that usually feels like a cold and indefinite waiting room for a spring that is perpetually running late, these 14 stations offer something more useful than hope: they offer friction. Whether it is the spectral gardens of Makov’s Kharkiv or the neon-lit, 90s dread of Inoue’s nightmares, the point is rarely to find an escape. It is to sit with the "afterword" of worlds that have already ended and see what, or who, is still standing in the wreckage.

February is short, but the archive is long. Go out, look at the walls, and try not to let the white cubes swallow you whole. We’ll see you on the other side of the solstice.


TEMPTRESSxKathe Pouli

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