By Oliver Eglin, November 10 2025
Islington-based Large Glass gallery is a unique space for photographic art and one somewhat obscured from the prominent gallery trail of the city’s centre.
Nestled amongst an eclectic mix of independent shops on North London’s Caledonian Road, the gallery’s latest exhibition, “Light Industry” is an interesting reflection on the locality’s industrial past and the near relentless gentrification that has followed. Showing the work of nine artists, the exhibition centres around a theme of human labour and industrial landscapes.
Filling the gallery’s shop front window is Craigie Horsfield’s “Al. J. Brodzka, Kraków. May 1994” a portrait of a Polish factory worker standing mutely over an anvil in front of a forge. A Sander-like pose betrays the harsh flash of Horsfield’s camera, used perhaps to convey the gritty realism of what appears to be a dark and windowless workshop, filled with dust and grime. His stained clothes blend into the distressed surfaces that surround him, and the dour expression of his face seems to show Horsfield’s intent: to depict a truer sense of labour, to convey the repetitive, dull and often arduous nature of manual work.
As well as images that study the role of workers and labour, more formal photographs, depicting industrial landscapes, comprise the majority of works in this exhibition. The gallery, though relatively small, manages to squeeze in an impressive collection of works from a range of prominent artists including Gerry Johansson, Guido Guidi and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.
“Hanford Stretch Coyote Rapids” (1992), a diptych by Mark Ruwedel, is an intriguing work which shows how the creep of industrial expansion penetrates landscapes even from afar. At the edge of a large body of water, the ghostly silhouette of The Hanford Site, a decommissioned nuclear complex in Washington State, emerges ominously from the mist on the horizon. What might otherwise look like a mid-19th Century landscape survey by Carleton Watkins, is instead firmly placed in the present.
Elsewhere in the exhibition Guido Guidi’s colour photographs stand out, in what is predominantly a show of black and white works. A colourist by nature, his photographs from Rimini subtly employ the beauty of tonality and a narrow depth of field, exploring the margins of Italian post-industrial landscape, without ceremony or whimsy. In one photograph, an overturned barrel of oil dominates the image, its atramentous contents spilling out of the frame in a foreboding stream of jet-black treacle. Known for its sandy beaches and exuberant nightlife, Guidi’s photographs of Rimini draw our attention to the material impacts that underpin urban developments.
Above the stairway, hangs Rut Blees Luxemburg’s “Gold Sack (London Dust)” (2014), another colour work, which pops stoutly from the gallery’s pale grey walls. Under the auric glow of streetlamps, a bag of spilled grit is transfigured into a sack of gold. Early 20th Century photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen began exploring how the electrification of city streetlights, made long exposures of urban environments at night compelling subject to explore in their work. Blees Luxemburg’s “London Dust “series continues this pursuit and her vision is one built around an absence of people in the landscape. At night, when the activity of construction ceases and workers have gone home, the discarded tools and materials of the industry become the objects of Blees Luxemburg’s gaze, what she describes as, “rich metaphors for fortune, loss, dormant desire... The night brings to light what is present yet hidden during the day.” Both Blees Luxemburg and Morgan Levy have an off-site installation piece in the form of a billboard display on the road outside the gallery.
In a fast-paced city like London, change can be imperceptible yet rapid. A short stroll from the gallery is London’s King’s Cross station, formerly the site of the city’s industrial powerhouse that has since been transformed by a multi-million-pound redevelopment. “Light Industry” offers a thoughtful meditation on the tension between the remnants of London’s industrial past and the visual shifts that occur through urban and industrial developments. Amid Europe’s ongoing deindustrialisation, the exhibition succeeds in raising thought-provoking questions about the role of labour and the legacies left behind in post-industrial landscapes.
Oliver Eglin is a photographer and was recently an Artist-in-residence at Guyan HuaxiangArt Center in Zhejiang, China. His critical writing has appeared in PORT Magazine.
"Light Industry" Installation view of MORGAN LEVY work.
GUIDO GUIDI "Rimini Nord Ottobre 1991", 1991. Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London 1991 © Guido Guidi.
MARK RUWEDEL "The Hanford Stretch Coyote Rapids, 1992-1993" (1993).Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London © Mark Ruwedel.
MORGAN LEVY "Rest Unquestioned", (2023.) Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London © Morgan Levy.
RUT BLEES LUXEMBURG "Gold Sack (London Dust), (2014). Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London. © Rut Blees Luxemburg.