Verdurin is a self-styled aesthetics store located in a social housing estate in Hoxton, a traditionally working-class neighborhood in East London famous for being hipster-central in the early noughties. Hosted by the critic and curator Pierre d’Alancaisez, its name is taken from Proust’s literary character Mme Verdurin, who in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu hosts a fashionable, literary salon in Paris. It’s an unlikely place to encounter a serious contemporary painting show these days. In the 1990s, at the height of the contemporary U.K. art scene, there were many artist-run spaces like these in East and South London. But as the gentrifying process that such spaces helped to set in motion gathered momentum, the properties that young artists once rented became unaffordable, and the big, commercial galleries moved in, sweeping up the cream of the painting crop.