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Backstage machinations - Isabella Amram, Juliet Dodson | - Oct 31
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Artissima - Mandy Franca | 29 Oct - 1 Nov

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Last day to visit Mandy Franca’s presentation at Artissima in Turin.

NEW ENTRIES BOOTH 1

@mandy__franca
@artissimafair by @nightcafegallery

Thank you Artsy for naming Mandy Franca’s presentation as one of the 5 best booths at Artissima!

@artsy
@mandy__franca
@artissimafair by @nightcafegallery

Night Café is pleased to present a solo booth by Mandy Franca at Artissima 2026, featuring In a State of Being, an ongoing body of work exploring the traces we leave behind as a way of affirming our existence.

Combining images of the sky taken on an iPhone with oil pastel and oil stick applied directly onto textile, Franca brings together digital images and physical mark-making. The works move between the vastness of the sky and the intimacy of the artist’s hand, reflecting on the Sublime, the everyday, and the ways in which we register our presence in the world. At a time when so many of our traces are made and mediated online, Franca considers what it means to leave a mark, and how the simple act of looking, photographing and making might connect us to a particular moment in time.  ARTISSIMA Oval Lingotto Fiere Via Giacomo Mattè Trucco 70, 10126 Torino, Italy

Supported by the @mondriaanfonds & @stichtingstokroos by @nightcafegallery

Night Café is pleased to present a solo booth by Mandy Franca at Artissima 2026, featuring In a State of Being, an ongoing body of work exploring the traces we leave behind as a way of affirming our existence.

Combining images of the sky taken on an iPhone with oil pastel and oil stick applied directly onto textile, Franca brings together digital images and physical mark-making. The works move between the vastness of the sky and the intimacy of the artist’s hand, reflecting on the Sublime, the everyday, and the ways in which we register our presence in the world. At a time when so many of our traces are made and mediated online, Franca considers what it means to leave a mark, and how the simple act of looking, photographing and making might connect us to a particular moment in time.  ARTISSIMA Oval Lingotto Fiere Via Giacomo Mattè Trucco 70, 10126 Torino, Italy

@mandy__franca by @nightcafegallery

Last week to visit ‘Backstage machinations’ at Night Café.

In this duo exhibition, Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson explore the trickster as someone who understands how perception works and knows how to work within it.

In Dodson’s ‘In the Limelight’, she thinks about self-awareness and consciousness. The light tries to camouflage itself but can’t, because it bounces off its own body. It’s both the device made to highlight the protagonist and the protagonist itself.

The title refers to the chemistry and materiality of the light. “In the limelight” is a phrase we use for people viewed by many eyes, on a screen or in a theatre, and she got interested in where it came from. Before the lightbulb, theatres used limelights: gas heated through a pipe onto a block of calcium oxide (quicklime, hence the phrase), which glowed with an intense white light.

‘Backstage machinations’ ends this Saturday.

@juliet_dodson_
@isabellaamram by @nightcafegallery

‘Backstage machinations’ continues this week!

Backstage machinations, is duo exhibition by Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson. Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition looks at the trickster as someone who understands how perception works and knows how to work within it.

The exhibition runs until October 31st.

Juliet Dodson, ‘Untitled (Sleeve)’, 2025. Hand engraved tin-plated steel. by @nightcafegallery

‘The Queen of Pentacles (Nympheas on Fire)’ is part of ‘Backstage machinations’, a duo exhibition by Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson. Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition looks at the trickster as someone who understands how perception works and knows how to work within it.

In Amram’s ‘The Queen of Pentacles (Nympheas on Fire)’, cunning operates through responsiveness rather than veiling. She understands the Queen’s power as an attentiveness to the living world: rather than dominating her surroundings, she reads their conditions and adapts to them. This extends into a dialogue with Monet’s Nymphéas series, where the garden becomes an environment to work within rather than control. Dense red gestures push through an already teeming field of greens, while scraped and dragged passages alter the direction of what came before. No single gesture controls the composition; each appears to respond to the conditions created by another. The paintings therefore enact two different forms of trickery: one manipulates what can be seen, while the other finds ways to move within conditions already in place.

Isabella Amram, ‘The Queen of Pentacles (Nympheas on Fire)’, 2026. 130 x 220 cm.Acrylic, oil, wax, oil stick and pigment on canvas.

@isabellaamram
@juliet_dodson_ by @nightcafegallery

‘Backstage machinations’ will have extended opening hours this week: Tue-Saturday, 12-5PM at 162 New Cavendish St in Fitzrovia.

Juliet Dodson, ‘Moon’. ‘Queen of Penticals’ and ‘Two of cups’, all metal Pressing drawings from 2026

@juliet_dodson_
@isabellaamram by @nightcafegallery

Continuing this week, Backstage machinations, a duo exhibition by Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson. Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition looks at the trickster as someone who understands how perception works and knows how to work within it.

Isabella Amram, The Moon (Nocturne for the Unseen), 2026. Acrylic, oil, wax, marble dust and pigment on canvas. 150 x 180 cm.

@isabellaamram by @nightcafegallery

Backstage machinations continues this week.

In this exhibition, Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson explore the mechanisms of the trickster.

Juliet Dodson,Threadbare, 2026
Iron, aluminium, thread
122 x 51 x 200 cm

@juliet_dodson_ by @nightcafegallery

Thank you all for coming other the opening of ‘Backstage machinations’, a duo show presenting new works by Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson.

The exhibition will be on view until October 31st.

Isabella Amram, ‘The Two of Cups (Study I: Love)’, 2026. Acrylic, oil, wax, oil stick and pigment on canvas. 150 x 120 cm

detail Isabella Amram, ‘The Two of Cups (Study I: Love)’, 2026; Installation view Isabella Amram, ‘The Two of Cups (Study I: Love)’, 2026

Left to right: Juliet Dodson, Trapdoor, 2026. Oak, cast glass, aluminium truss. 168 x 93 x 87 cm; Juliet Dodson, Trapdoor, 2026. Oak, cast glass, aluminium truss. 168 x 93 x 87 cm. by @nightcafegallery

Night Café is pleased to announce Backstage machinations, a duo exhibition by Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson. Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition looks at the trickster as someone who understands how perception works and knows how to work within it. The exhibition will open with a Private View this Wednesday, September 23, from 6-8 PM.

The act of tricking someone. You set up the conditions in a certain way, perhaps through revealing and concealing certain bits of information, so that someone arrives at an outcome you have already anticipated. To successfully trick someone, you need to understand what someone expects to see, how they are likely to interpret it, and how those expectations can be used to produce a different outcome.
‍ The trickster does not necessarily control the conditions they are working within. They understand them well enough to find another way through. Cunning, in this sense, is not simply deception, but a way of reading a situation and knowing where there is room to act. This kind of agency has particular resonance for those whose access to direct forms of power has historically been restricted. Backstage machinations turns its gaze to the mechanisms of trickery: what happens when you cannot change the conditions, but can understand how they work well enough to use them to your advantage.
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Images from left to right: Isabella Amram, The Queen of Pentacles (Nympheas on Fire)’, 2026. 130 x 220 cm. Acrylic, oil, wax, oil stick and pigment on canvas; Juliet Dodson, ‘In the Limelight’, 2026. 69 x 37 x 150 cm. Phenolic cotton laminate, steel, glass, limestone, gass light, calcium carbonate. by @nightcafegallery