The Unconscious Therapy at 95 New Bond Street, Frieze Week
In October 2021, LUAP stages his most expansive solo exhibition to date inside a former retail space on New Bond Street. The show combines painting, installation, sound and sculpture in a tactile and psychological encounter with the recurring figure of the Pink Bear.
A Solo Exhibition by LUAP
Curated by MC Llamas
13 October to 17 October 2021
Extended to 31 October 2021
95 New Bond Street, London
Spanning three floors and more than six thousand square feet, The Unconscious Therapy presents a multi-sensory exploration of mental health, memory and emotional presence. Curated by MC Llamas and supported by Great Portland Estates, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience LUAP’s work at scale and in dialogue with space, sound and material.
The Pink Bear, central to the artist’s practice, appears throughout. Developed during sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy, the Bear began as a fragment of childhood memory and has since become a visual and emotional anchor across LUAP’s painting, photography and installation. In this context, it is less a character than a lens. It allows difficult emotional states to take form without explanation.
Visitors enter through a ground floor entirely covered in synthetic pink fur. Walls, floor and ceiling are wrapped in over one hundred and fifty metres of soft texture, removing the sharp edges of the room and replacing them with a feeling of warmth that teeters on the edge of claustrophobia. The result is both inviting and disorienting. The Bear is there, watching, or watched.
Downstairs in the basement, new paintings are shown. These works draw on LUAP’s documented expeditions, many of which involve placing the Pink Bear in remote natural environments. The settings are real, but altered. They become scenes of projection and reflection. Each painting is built slowly over time, layering photographic realism with expressive abstraction. The Bear appears alone in landscapes that are not fixed. They shift between safety and exposure.
The upper floor opens into audio, video and archival material. A slide installation and atmospheric soundtrack by Sarah HB run across the space. Recordings echo and overlap. The tone becomes less linear, more impressionistic. Visitors move through fragments of process and memory rather than fixed narratives. The Bear becomes a figure glimpsed rather than staged.
Throughout the exhibition, the artist invites the audience to sit with emotion rather than interpret it. LUAP collaborates with the Daisy Green Collection to offer Bear-themed food and drinks. These are not decorative. They are part of the emotional language of the show. Everything is part of the same logic — that feeling is spatial, material and continuous.
The fur from the installation is responsibly rehomed after the show closes.
The Unconscious Therapy does not present a resolved thesis. Instead, it allows for uncertainty. LUAP offers the Bear as a figure of containment, contradiction and quiet presence. It does not speak for the viewer, but it remains there with them, holding space.