The London art scene is suffering. Over the past 12 months the capital has lost Stephen Friedman, Beers, TJ Boulting and Sid Motion, independent art school Art Academy London and art and science hub the Science Gallery London. Gagosian is scaling back its presence in the city, and smaller independent and DIY venues are closing too. Explanations have varied—from the parlous state of the international art market to the effects of Brexit and a lack of funding—but whatever the cause, the decline of organizations like these affects London’s artists. Stephen Friedman brought through the likes of Yinka Shonibare and David Shrigley, and Art Academy London alumni include rising artists Lara Julien and Gemma Holzer. London’s reputation as a center of creative experimentation is built on operational support; artists need the space, patience and administrative assistance to do their jobs. Somerset House Studios, though, is standing strong. And this year marks the project’s 10th anniversary.

Constructed in the 18th Century in what is now central London, Somerset House has over time been an administrative base for the British Admiralty and the headquarters of the Inland Revenue, the U.K. government’s tax department. After the tax department moved out in the late 1990s, the grand building was converted into an arts center and, 16 years later, launched the Somerset House Studios complex, which provides workspaces and a public platform for up to 70 artists at a time. Marie McPartlin has been the director of Somerset House Studios since the project opened its doors, and her job is to oversee the Studios’ artistic and curatorial direction, cultural positioning and operative structure.

“Our 10th year has provoked a lot of reflection,” she tells Observer. “We’re really thinking about where we can next have the most impact, which is taking us in two directions. We’re working much more internationally than we were five years ago, and we’re keen to expand that. We’re also thinking a lot about the potential of artist research for other sectors and industries, policy and the development of new technologies.” Three of the Studios’ artists will soon present their research to more than 1,000 policymakers at the Global Forum on the Ethics of A.I. The Studios’ interdisciplinary fellowship, n-Space, is producing ideas that will sit outside of existing arts structures. The current n-Space fellows recently staged a live court hearing with real trainee barristers, putting a fictional dual-use technology—civilian and military—on trial against real evidence, to test whether existing legal frameworks could hold a technological system to account. Featuring a roll call of Somerset House Studios artists, the anniversary celebrations include live performances, commissions and new installations that collide art with advanced technologies, along with the launch of 3ETV, a TV station hosted on Somerset House’s online video platform, Channel.

Projects like these help build on the Studios’ reputation for experimentation and inclusivity. What does Marie do to keep the experimental fires burning? “The Studios is based on the premise that artists should be supported in experimentation,” she says. “In the early days, the only way to get started was to go out, find people and ask them to come to Somerset House. You build trust over time by demonstrating the type of artists and work you want to support and, importantly, how you want to work. I don’t think we’ve done enough to support artists from lower socio-economic backgrounds joining the Studios, and that’s an important area of focus for us going forward.” Before leading Somerset House Studios, Marie held roles at London’s Barbican arts center, the Sydney Festival and British heritage charity the National Trust. “I’ve always been interested in ideas first and foremost, rather than the constraints of how an idea might be expressed. My own career has been very polymorphous in that regard, moving between music, performance, art, writing, without really knowing the canon for any of them. A professional imposter, it feels like sometimes. But being an expert or specialist comes with a lot of baggage. It can be really freeing to not know all the rules or history, how something should be done, and that’s what experimentation is in my mind, following the idea first, being open and curious about what form the expression might take.”

All the Studios’ artists commit to giving something back to their community and peers as part of their residency. “Mentoring, sharing a skill, acting as a critical friend. This is contractual and creates an environment of mutual support,” Marie explains. “Also, we’ve made our residencies really long term. Most are between five and seven years long. Some are 10. So artists are looking at having some stability for a decent chunk of their career, and most likely working with us on more than one idea or project over that time. In-progress work is welcome, and failure is part of the process. We create specific frameworks for artists to experiment within, where the audience is also primed to receive the experiment as just that. The phase we’re most interested in supporting is the bridge between what an artist makes in private and what they formally present in public, and how we support that bit in the middle.” New work emanating from the Studios includes a co-commission (with new NYC space Canyon) of a playable video game by Korean artist Ayoung Kim, fresh from her 2025 MoMA show and LG Guggenheim Award win, a collaboration between Studios artists Zein Majali (a former data analyst) and ex-ballet dancer Nina Davies, and a performance by Arkansas-born experimental pianist Precious Renee Tucker. Precious has an interest in exoplanetary weather systems, so the Somerset House Studios team has paired her with scientists from King’s College London to help realize her thoughts for the artwork.

Yet, outside the excellent work Somerset House Studios is doing, other London spaces continue to close. What does Marie think needs to happen to stop the capital from losing yet more creative communities? “This requires a major overhaul in thinking about arts funding and how it’s distributed. How the avant-garde, experimental and the underground feeds the mainstream has been a cornerstone of the Studios since the beginning,” she says. “London itself is now so expensive that many artists have left. There isn’t much operating at our scale here, and I wish there were, as I think our model does support the wider creative community in the city. Parts of it could be replicated by anyone with a large building and a shift in the traditional hierarchies of how these spaces operate.”

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In June, British high street bakery chain Greggs issued an invitation to visit London’s Design Museum for the unveiling of their Ta-Pastry. Created in collaboration with Hawthorne and Heaney, official embroiderers to the royal family, the Ta-Pastry is an eight-meter-long hand-stitched artwork that tells the story of one of Greggs’ bestselling products, the sausage roll. A clever, headline-grabbing wheeze, the baker’s marketing move plugged directly into the anticipatory fever surrounding the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry in the U.K. for the first time in 1,000 years for an exhibition at the British Museum in London in September.

Somewhat longer than the Ta-Pastry at just under 70 meters, the Bayeux Tapestry was created in (or near; accounts vary) the English city of Canterbury to record events around the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when French and Flemish forces invaded Britain and went on to rule the country for 88 years. Thought to have been commissioned by Bishop Odo—half-brother of the forces’ leader, William the Conqueror—and symbolizing an epochal victory over the British, the Bayeux Tapestry was transported to France shortly after it was made, where it has remained until now.

Anticipation is building. Like Greggs, visitors are revving up for a chance to enter the tapestry’s orbit. The British Museum’s website crashed when the exhibition tickets went on sale in early July, and national and international news cycles have featured excited updates in the run-up to the opening day. When the tapestry arrived in the U.K. in the dead of night, a press corps was on hand to record the moment, and a message of thanks from the tapestry’s home in Bayeux was projected onto the cliffs of Dover in England. However, there is more to this than a cozy cultural handshake; examining the process behind lending out such a distinguished piece of art history reveals layers of diplomacy, from conciliation to economic benefits. When French president Emmanuel Macron signed off the Bayeux Tapestry loan agreement with then-U.K. prime minister Sir Keir Starmer in 2025, he called the deal a “gesture of trust” and the start of a “new chapter” in Anglo-French relations. Also, the loan agreement is enshrined in watertight regulations. From now on, the agreement says, any disputes around the tapestry (where it should be displayed or who really owns it, for example) can only be settled through Anglo-French diplomatic channels, effectively banning either country from using external international tribunals.

The Bayeux Tapestry’s themes of cross-border fighting are a reminder that relationships between the U.K. and France have ebbed and flowed for centuries. The 1066 invasion notwithstanding, the two countries have fought over territories, colonial ambitions and ideologies, from the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 to the British campaign to help European allies overthrow Napoleon in the late 19th Century. And, although there was relative diplomatic peace between the two countries following the two World Wars, as the U.K. prepared to vote on leaving the European Union in 2016, relations wilted once more. U.K. tabloid newspaper The Sun showed its support for Brexit with the unequivocal headline, “Up Your Delors,” a reference to Jacques Delors, the French politician who was instrumental in officially establishing the European Union in 1993. A U.K. government poll held just before the Brexit vote took place showed that only 11 percent of French citizens would want the U.K. to maintain free trade deals with Europe after leaving the European Union, as opposed to 42 percent of Britons polled.

And the wrangling has continued post-Brexit. In 2021, Macron told a press conference that the British government “doesn’t do what they say” over a lack of progress in helping France stem immigration across the English Channel. The following year, another ex-British prime minister, Boris Johnson, publicly admonished the French president, telling him to “donnez-moi un break” when Macron argued that the U.K. had damaged relations by snagging a deal to build nuclear submarines for Australia, a lucrative contract previously held by French company, the Naval Group. Brexit also triggered Anglo-French disputes over fishing rights. In 2021, the French authorities detained a British trawler after the boat impinged on areas reserved for French fishing. A diplomatic stand-off followed, with the British government procrastinating over issuing French fishermen with permits to fish in waters around the U.K. More broadly, with the U.K. no longer a member of the European Union and its influence on European politics drastically diminished, the French government has moved on to build stronger strategic ties with its nearer, more influential neighbors.

Thus, the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry in the U.K. marks a remarkable turn of events, especially given Macron has little to gain politically in signing the loan agreement. However, seeing beyond their differences has meant both parties have allowed other benefits to surface. In return for the tapestry loan, the U.K. government is lending France Anglo-Saxon artifacts from the Sutton Hoo burial sites and the Lewis Chessmen—the venerated 12th-century chess pieces discovered on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in 1831—for a series of exhibitions in Normandy. Both loan initiatives mean that thousands of visitors in the U.K. and France will get to see some of the most important objects in the history of art and archaeology. And the British Museum has extended Bayeux Tapestry fever beyond London. Aside from the central exhibition, the museum has announced Bayeux Around Britain, a program designed to ensure a tapestry-related event of some kind is within an hour’s drive of two-thirds of the U.K.’s population. Cultural and educational impact aside, the main Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum is set to generate millions of pounds for the U.K. economy. To date, ticket sales for the show have reached almost £2.5 million ($3.3 million), with more money to come from corporate sponsorship, merchandise and the knock-on visitor effects on hotels, restaurants and public transport.

Undoubtedly, the loan exchange breaks new ground in Anglo-French relations, with both countries winning, along with the public at large. Above all, though, this kind of measured, well-crafted understanding shows how great art can bring nations together. Perhaps other countries could try it.

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Last year, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, staged “This Is What You Get,” an exhibition of artwork by artist Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead. Critics’ reactions were mixed. The Guardian said of the artwork, “Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It’s a nice dream, but nope,” while The Independent called the exhibition “…fascinating, and not just for Radiohead fans but for anyone intrigued by the interweaving of sonic and visual art forms.” The show largely consisted of paintings and prints created by Yorke and Donwood for Radiohead’s album and singles covers, interspersed with a healthy dose of merchandise. All this was catnip for Radiohead fans, and demand for tickets was so high that the exhibition was extended to cope with the numbers.

Radiohead is one of the biggest bands on the planet right now, and the clamor around Yorke’s exhibition illustrates how acclaimed musicians occupy a unique position when they enter the world of fine art. Full-time fine artists need to build a following—especially in the social media age—and wangle their way into curators’ affections. But, for someone like Yorke, the audience for their artwork is readymade: diehard fans make for willing collectors. Plus, having a devoted following means that the power of art critics’ opinions is negligible. Who needs a thumbs-up from the art press when musicians have a mass of supporters keenly anticipating their next move? But sales of artwork to fans aside, can a musician’s artwork really be worth exploring for the less partisan collector?

Broadly, the more famous the musician, the more collectable their artwork. Take Bob Dylan, the musician/artist mash-up OG. Although he started making art in the 1960s, Dylan waited until 2008 to put his work up for sale, and collectors tend to favor his early pieces. In 2022, his Abstract Nude oil painting from the 1960s realized $100,000 at auction, while in 2025 another oil, Amusement Park Alleyway (painted in 2016), sold for $73,000. Ex-Ealing College of Art student Ronnie Wood uses his paintings to document his life as a member of the Rolling Stones. In 2023, the company he set up to sell his art reported sales of just under $2 million in the previous year. In 2013, Yorke and Donwood’s painting Business School for the Dead sold at a Bonhams auction for $7,500, but by 2025, Yorke’s standalone paintings were fetching upwards of $10,000.

White Stripes co-founder and solo rocker Jack White has also thrown his hat into the fine art ring, making 3D printed figures and sculptures from found objects. As with Yorke, he collaborates with an established artist—Damien Hirst—to bring his artwork to the masses and navigate the art world. Hirst hosted White’s first-ever exhibition at his Newport Street Gallery in London, and the pair have collaborated on SUPERNOVA, a painted Eames chair (White was an upholsterer before the White Stripes took off). The piece is currently unpriced, but Hirst sells similar spin-painted chairs for $19,000.

Ex-Sonic Youth member and Otis Art Institute graduate Kim Gordon understands that creating limited edition multiples offers cheaper alternatives to collectors than original artwork, and her signed prints typically sell for between $1,000 and $3,000. Bob Dylan and Ronnie Wood also sell signed prints of their work, with prices ranging from $700 for a print signed by Wood to $8,000 for a signed Dylan. And, while the high ticket, one-off artworks are usually only available from auction houses and gallery dealers, these multiples are often for sale via the artists’ websites and online stores. In 2024, Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands hosted “The Devil: A Life,” an exhibition of 17 ceramic figures created by goth rock figurehead and trained ceramicist Nick Cave. The figures were never intended as a commercial venture, and the museum acquired the entire set. However, Cave Things, the website Cave set up in 2020, was built specifically to sell affordable versions of his art and design work. Inside, Cave’s doodles, photos and whimsical articles from his own collection are converted into collectable editions and ephemera.

As for other musical big names, erstwhile bass player with The Clash, Paul Simonon, has largely left his day job behind to become a full-time artist, and electronic music pioneer Brian Eno’s investigations into digital possibilities extend to abstract printworks. Prices for Eno’s prints hover around the $2,000 mark, and Simonon’s oil paintings cost up to $13,000. Paul McCartney started painting in the 1980s and his artwork rarely comes to market, although Images of a Woman, painted by all four members of The Beatles in 1966, sold for $1.2 million at auction in 2024. An avid art collector himself, David Bowie made paintings that paid tribute to the kind of European abstract expressionism evinced by Frank Auerbach and David Bomberg. As with McCartney, original Bowie artworks are scarce—especially since his death in 2016—although in 2021, a fortunate shopper who bought a painting from his DHead series for $4 from a charity shop went on to sell it for $87,000 at auction.

Unalloyed luck aside, there are two levels of entry when it comes to acquiring original artwork by rock musicians: the auction house and gallery route, and buying direct from a performer’s website or online store. The former is, of course, more expensive, as totals factor in administrative and dealer costs on top of the sale price. This acquisition process works for a collector looking to buy a piece that will increase in value over time—a Bob Dylan original, for example. Taking the latter option means cutting out the middleman, and offers access to less expensive pieces. Overall, the advice from the late British artist Norman Ackroyd will always ring true. When the Royal Academy asked him for his thoughts on collecting art, he replied, “When it goes on the wall, can you live with it? Sometimes, of course, the question is, could you live without it—and if it’s no, that’s when you really go for something.”

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Originally named Alan Cristea Gallery after its founder, Cristea Roberts Gallery was established in London’s West End in 1995. Three years on, the space was rebranded as Cristea Roberts after David Cleaton-Roberts joined Cristea’s team as director, with a remit to bring a new generation of artists to the gallery. Nestled in the Pall Mall area near Piccadilly, it specializes in original fine art prints and works on paper by some of the most recognizable names in contemporary art. Currently, the gallery is staging London’s first Sol LeWitt exhibition in eight years, showcasing a selection of graphic works the late American artist made between 1970 and 2005. (Other names on their roster include Georg Baselitz, Julian Opie, Jim Dine and Antony Gormley, and the gallery manages the print work estates of Josef Albers, Naum Gabo and Richard Hamilton.)

Observer recently asked Cleaton-Roberts how potential collectors should go about acquiring prints, and he is adamant that collectors should start with what they like. “Don’t be driven by investment, status or current trends, but instead identify which artists, periods or styles you are drawn to and then start looking,” he says. “Take time to learn about the artists and mediums and, most importantly, look in person. Look for artists who have really engaged with printmaking as a way to expand their repertoire. Be curious as to what you are looking at, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.” He acknowledges that prints can seem confusing, with their niche terms and conflicting information and pricing, but true experts will be able to answer questions with clarity. Authenticity is important too. “Be mindful of how much input an artist has had in the making of the work. Printmaking is a naturally collaborative process, but the artist should always be involved on some level.”

Prior to joining Cristea Roberts, Cleaton-Roberts served on the selection committee for the Armory Show and as vice president of New York’s International Fine Prints and Drawings Association (IFPDA). As to what role art fairs play in the print world, he says fairs like Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach and Frieze London, which devote specific sectors to original prints, “are important as they’re an opportunity for collectors to see which artists are making print media alongside the other areas of their practice. Also, the IFPDA fair is one of the few fairs—along with the London Original Print Fair—where it’s possible to see the whole gamut of printmaking from historical Old Master prints to the best contemporary editions, all under one roof.”

He’s particularly passionate about how artists’ print works are presented and perceived at fairs. “I feel very strongly that printmaking is too often seen as the poor cousin to other mediums and is always best placed at fairs when it’s exhibited amongst the other works on an equal footing,” he explains. “I find fairs which actively exclude print publishers and dealers—but then put prints for sale in their gift shops—frustrating and insulting to the artists who prioritize printmaking as part of their oeuvre.”

Legacy printmaking aside, Cleaton-Roberts has some interesting thoughts on the convergence of the print market and new technologies. “Artists have always been quick to embrace new technology, and most are primarily interested in how it can inform and further their practice,” he says. “NFTs and the role of blockchain in the art world became a talking point during the COVID-19 pandemic when galleries, artists and collectors were forced to pivot to more digital interactions, as opposed to in-person exchanges… What NFTs did pre-empt was a new approach to some physical print releases.” They heralded the creation of online companies that launched editions, mimicking the way NFTs were sold, in which the edition size was determined by how many copies were sold within a specified time period.

This way of working, he says, muddied the waters in terms of authenticity. Creative decisions that would usually be part of the original artist’s process—choosing particular mediums and edition sizes, for example—were now being made by print-producing companies based solely on market demand. “This means buyers have no clarity on what they are actually buying at the time of purchase, which led to a prevalence of reproductive prints being sold as new, limited editions by artists both current and long-dead, who had no hand in their fabrication.” This creates confusion about what constitutes an original print—made by an artist, with their intent—versus a reproduction, where an artist has had no input into or hand in the creative process.

It’s something many buyers are unaware of, and for David, education plays a crucial part in preventing misunderstandings. “Most conversations about prints immediately focus on the technical aspects, throwing out terms like intaglio, spit bite and planographic,” he says. “Whilst important, I think these often obfuscate the real message, which is that printmaking—in its true and original use—is primarily a collection of mediums for artists to make images and artworks. I first highlight how people often confuse the terms ‘unique’ and ‘original’ to mean the same thing, which they don’t. An original print—versus a reproductive print—can be made in an edition, but can be unique as well, where only one copy is printed.” He also spends time dispelling commonly held myths. “A frequently asked question at lectures and art fairs is: ‘…is copy number one in an edition the most valuable?’ To which the answer is ‘no’.”

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Established in Macon, Georgia, in 1990, Melgenia and Vernon Redd’s Miracles Art Gallery would go on to house one of the world’s most important collections of Black art. “By day, my parents worked as telecommunications engineers, immersed in blueprints, cables and network grids. By night and on weekends, they were building an institution,” artist Marques Redd tells Observer, meditating on his parents’ commitment to championing and preserving talent. “The collection has been foundational to my development as an artist. It formed the ground of my seeing long before I had language for what art could do.”

Today, Marques is the collection’s custodian, along with his sister and fellow artist, Marquita Sams. Understandably, their artwork is steeped in the collection’s themes. “Growing up, I was surrounded not just by art, but by thoughtful, critical reflection on art,” Marques explains. “Particularly the idea that Black visual culture carried history, philosophy and spiritual instruction.”

With the gallery still in the planning stages, Melgenia and Vernon worked their day jobs while building an art collection from the ground up and taking artworks into the community. “They turned our attic into a framing studio, forged lasting relationships with artists and gave workshops in school auditoriums and public spaces,” Marques says. “They cut glass late into the night so the work could be seen properly the next day.” He grew up in the presence of pieces from Romare Bearden, praised as “the nation’s foremost collagist” by the New York Times when he died in 1988; the late Jacob Lawrence (a key member of the Harlem Renaissance movement who described his approach to painting and printmaking as “dynamic Cubism”); and contemporary artists Kathleen Atkins Wilson, Larry Ponch Brown and Joseph Holston. “Jacob Lawrence’s Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series introduced me to history as movement, struggle and form. With its figures straining against what I now understand as the Plantation Matrix.” Born into slavery in Haiti in 1743, Toussaint L’Ouverture went on to lead the Haitian Revolution against French colonial rule, the first successful campaign to abolish slavery in modern history.

Flooding, coupled with Vernon’s deteriorating health, forced the gallery’s closure in the late 1990s, and the collection was stored away in the Redd family home. The COVID lockdown, however, gave Marques the time to work on reintroducing the collection to the public. He began digitizing the artworks, and under the aegis of Rainbow Serpent, the multidisciplinary arts nonprofit he co-founded with Nigerian-American artist Mikael Owunna, he curated pieces from the collection for Juneteenth festivals in Pittsburgh and Macon. In 2024, artworks from the Redd Family Collection appeared in the “Pioneers of Purpose” exhibition at Macon’s Douglass Theatre and the Tubman African American Museum’s exhibition “The Water Spirit Will Take Us Home.” The Tubman Museum was also the setting for the most comprehensive exhibition of works from the collection to date, “Miracles: A Selection from the Redd Family Collection of Black Art.” “With each exhibition and digital initiative, the collection continues to move,” Marques says. “It’s a river of memory carrying Black artistic vision forward into the present.” Marques and his team made a documentary about the “Miracles” show, which is free to watch on YouTube.

Along with serving as the organizational backbone for the Redd Family Collection, Rainbow Serpent supports the advancement of Black LGBTQ+ culture at the intersection of African cosmologies, multimedia art and emerging technologies. Marques is working on a biographical book in which he unpicks how the collection has shaped his work. “Among the more than 800 objects my parents assembled were pieces that planted deep seeds,” he says. “The Nguni shields that lined the walls were early lessons in what it meant to be a warrior for Black culture. Dogon masks were fragments of a cosmology I would later enter fully, and images of Tutankhamun offered my first glimpses of an ancient Egyptian current that now anchors much of my work. Woven cloths with Adinkra and Nsibidi symbols were codes of thought, justice, divination and remembrance that I didn’t yet understand, but I kind of knew they were using a grammar older than English.”

The Redd Family Collection continues to grow. “I’m in constant dialogue with a growing international community of artists across the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Nigeria and Romania,” Marques says. “I’ve been supporting and collecting artists whose practices expand the lineage of the Black art my parents championed, while reflecting our movement’s contemporary spiritual, political and aesthetic concerns. Artists I’m adding to the collection include Devan Shimoyama, Ajamu X and Granville Carroll, among others. The work of these artists is deeply invested in Black queer life, embodiment, intimacy and myth-making.”

There is more to come, with Marques and Marquita brainstorming new paths of accessibility. “We plan to continue presenting the work through museum exhibitions and shows at universities, alongside community-based events that stay true to the collection’s original spirit of meeting people where they are,” he says. “We’re also expanding access through digital platforms. We’re developing a metaverse experience that allows people to encounter works from the collection online.” Their goal is to ensure the collection functions as a living, evolving resource for dialogue and cultural connection—one that circulates locally and globally.

Marques also hopes the collection will teach others about the ongoing hard work required to build culture. “I want people to understand that invisible, unglamorous, deeply committed labor is how culture is sustained,” he concludes. “This collection really transcends a group of objects; it’s a record of devotion, sacrifice and belief in the necessity of Black art. I hope it teaches others that institutions don’t only come from wealth or prestige. They can be built through love, rigor and an unwavering commitment to making space for beauty and collective memory.”

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A white cockatoo is on the verge of death as air is sucked from its glass trap. Two young girls look on, aghast. Maybe the croaking fowl is their pet? That unfortunate bird is the center of attention in Joseph Wright’s 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. A beloved artwork in the U.K., the piece is a marquee draw in the National Gallery in London’s new “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows” exhibition. It is not as if Wright did not have alternatives to using the demise of a fine-looking bird for the image. A sealed paper bag would have inflated as oxygen was removed from the glass globe, for example. But that would have been boring, and Wright was a dramatist. Plus, none of this would be happening without the wild-haired pump operator looking out from the canvas. He is in charge. If he stopped the pump and allowed the air back into the glass, the bird would survive. Talk about tension.

Born in the northern English town of Derby in 1734, Joseph Wright was working during the Age of Enlightenment. The air pump was a relatively new invention, a contraption that demonstrated that the atmosphere was something that could be manipulated, a radical idea in the eighteenth century. Until then, religion and ancient philosophy had explained what things were. Air was an Aristotelian element, an unchangeable substance that sat between earth and fire. So, amid the drama, Wright was also documenting the kind of scientific development that characterized the era’s new thinking. His 1771 painting The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosophers Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers shows the German alchemist Hennig Brand accidentally discovering phosphorus while trying to turn a base metal into gold. As with his air pump painting, Wright was laying out a key moment in science. Although Benjamin Franklin had been experimenting with lightning conduction since the 1750s, electricity had yet to become a source of light and power. So Hennig’s incidental discovery—that man could manufacture an artificial light source—was another epochal lightbulb moment.

The theme of light runs throughout the exhibition. There are more than 20 pieces on view, concentrating on Wright’s candlelit work, the period when the artist used single sources of light to build atmosphere and anticipation. And with the light comes the dark. Wright’s dense, flat shadows frame the action, bringing depth and theater to the fore. It is natural to compare his output with artwork by another great dramatist and master of light, Caravaggio. Both artists employed the dark-light schematic of chiaroscuro, although Wright tended toward tenebrism, a more contrast-heavy variation. Where Caravaggio’s sense of tension stemmed from emotional turmoil and social vérité, Wright’s work was more pastoral and less dangerous, unless you are a bird, despite his dramatic leanings. Caravaggio, of course, had painted his last works roughly one hundred years earlier. Nonetheless, Wright’s work is stunning. Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent from 1773 is a pastoral case in point. A man is filling in earths, also known as foxholes, to stop foxes from hiding in their dens during the next day’s hunt along the River Derwent. As the digger toils, the night sky looms above. In A Philosopher by Lamplight, painted around 1769, the philosopher stands outdoors, examining human bones in his quest to understand anatomy, lit by a single lamp’s flame.

Wright’s work is steeped in real-life situations, but it is also rich in symbolism. Completed in 1766, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place shows a scientist demonstrating the solar system’s orbits. At the same time, it stands in for the Age of Enlightenment’s broader epiphanies. Pulsing at the orrery’s center, the sun casts a newly birthed light as science triumphs over religion and superstition. The exhibition’s curators have positioned an actual orrery in a vitrine beside the painting, a careful reproduction of the original machine. Wright’s local connections to figures such as Josiah Wedgwood of Wedgwood pottery, Richard Arkwright, an industrial mechanization pioneer, and astronomer James Ferguson, who frequently lectured in Derby, meant he moved among leading minds in science and industry. In recording genuine experiments, Wright’s paintings function as reportage, documenting the accumulating technological breakthroughs that paved the way toward the Industrial Revolution.

There are more parochial paintings on view as well. Both from 1770, Two Boys Fighting Over a Bladder and A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder appear kitschy and Rockwell-esque. These are fanciful, sentimental depictions of everyday life that were fashionable at the time. Even so, the composition of the struggling youths is intriguing. From a distance, one of the figures looks like an act of vandalism, a swirling smudge of black paint on the canvas. Closer inspection reveals the boy has his back to us and is rendered almost entirely as a shadowy silhouette. His adversary reels back, clutching his ear in agony. It is clever stuff.

Wright made five versions in his The Blacksmith’s Shop series. The 1771 example on view here, like Earthstopper, is staged in the dead of night. This time, the primary light source is the lump of metal the farriers are hammering into shape. The glowing metal picks out the blacksmiths’ flushed cheeks and beaded brows as the moon glowers through the workshop roof.

Wright’s sense of theater was immersive. The figures in his larger paintings are nearly life-sized. Imagine the reaction when they were first unveiled. This was life in high definition, with viewers cast as participants, absorbing the scenes around them. More than 250 years on, Wright of Derby’s paintings remain an enthralling testament to a master of illumination.

“Wright of Derby: From the Shadows“ is at the National Gallery in London through May 10, 2026. Advanced booking is recommended.

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Remarkably, Emily Kam Kngwarray only spent around eight years painting. Born in Alhalkere, Utopia in Australia’s Northern Territory in 1910, Kngwarray was aged eighty-six when she died. For most of her life, she helped her family bring up their kids and worked on cattle stations. Then, in her late seventies, she began to paint. And what paintings she made. London’s Tate Modern gallery is staging Europe’s first expansive, detailed solo exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s artistic contributions and the show reverberates with an otherworldly wisdom.

When Kngwarray was born, Utopia was a broad area of grazing pasture leased from the Australian government. In 1978, the region was recognized as a true homeland of the Anmatyerr and the Alyawarre Aboriginal tribes and returned to their care. Kngwarray was an Anmatyerr elder and her artwork sways gracefully with the history of her people and the Dreaming, the Aboriginal origin story of the universe and everything within it.

The awely ceremonies, wherein women sing and dance in celebration and homage to the earth’s fertility, are a central element in Kngwarray’s vision. The women paint their bodies with ground ochres for the rituals and Kngwarray transported these decorations to her paintings. Her mighty five meter-long Yam awely painting, made the year before she died, is a dizzy reel of a picture. Kngwarray’s favored earth tones and uncut jewel colors weave across the canvas as if following nature’s meandering rhythms. Kngwarray laid her canvases out flat on the ground and painted sitting on the floor, giving her work the levitational quality of an aerial view. It might reasonably be imagined that her marks show the images seen by spirits floating above the land.

Emily Kam Kngwarray’s first artistic experiments began in the 1970s when she learned the process of batik printing and a selection of her fabric prints is on show here too. Majestic in scale, the decorated textiles hang elegantly in the center of the room. The art of batik had been introduced as part of a government-backed education program and the women of Utopia used the initiative to illustrate that the art of the region was not just a male-only practice. Plus, local art had previously been confined to making marks on the ground, on bodies and on objects. Now the symbols and patterns could be transferred to fabric. The program also gave Kngwarray the chance to cut her artistic teeth and her painted works that followed sprouted from the freedom batik printing had unlocked.

As Kngwarray’s output reached warp speed, she produced around three thousand paintings during her eight-year sprint and, along with the awely ceremonies, Alhalkere’s ecology inhabited her work. The “Kam” part of Kngwarray’s name came from the seedpods (a.k.a., kam) of the pencil yam vegetable and she painted the seeds, yams and other flora of the area, as well as its indigenous birds and animals. Made in 1991, Kam is a testament to the kam’s importance, as thousands of seed-like blotches swarm across the canvas, ready to settle down and find a place to grow. Marking Kngwarray’s transition from batik to painting with acrylics, her Emu Woman artwork from 1988 is of a barely discernible naked female torso dancing in tribute to the native bird. Included in the “A Summer Project: Utopia Women’s Paintings” exhibition held at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery in 1989, Emu Woman launched Kngwarray’s artistic career. Not bad going for an artist’s first-ever painting.

Ntang grass seeds figure in another early painting, Ntang Dreaming, the punctuating blobs underlining Kngwarray’s gift for enveloping dazzling intricacy within deceptive simplicity. Ntang 1990 is a collection of green, orange and off-white dots. Or is it? Zoom in and there are undulating ribbons and shapes embedded mysteriously beneath the splodges. Ridges appear and disappear like mountains at dawn and dusk. Kngwarray’s dot work makes Damien Hirst’s spot paintings look like a cynical exercise in churned-out commercial opportunism. Her wavy lines are liberating and spiritual. The Alhalker suite from 1993 is a humongous mosaic of twenty-two canvases that works as a gorgeously hectic portrait of Kngwarray’s beloved landscape decked out in blooming wildflowers.

The year after Kngwarray died, her work was represented in the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There are no records that explain why her output was not included while she was alive. However, the 1997 Pavilion did also include artwork by Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson in a move that helped the entrenched art world understand the culture, skills and importance of female Australian Aboriginal artists. Emily’s Untitled (Awely) canvases from 1994 were part of the Pavilion’s display and they feature here. A six-panel piece, the paintings look like layers of stratified earth or rows of roughly ploughed furrows.

The concept of Country is an intrinsic facet of the Australian Aboriginal people’s relationship with their home. Country connects them to their ancestors and to the land that provides them with food and shelter. As much as anything, Kngwarray’s artwork gently explains the importance of Country. It is almost as if her pieces were completed by (whisper it) a higher force. And if all this sounds a bit gushy, who cares? This is artwork that can lift the lowest of spirits.

“Emily Kam Kngwarray” is at Tate Modern through January 11, 2026. Advanced booking is advised.

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It seems odd that London’s Tate Britain gallery is running these two shows in parallel, rather than merging them into a single exhibition. Here is a pair of British painters, both remarkable in their own way—Ithell Colquhoun, the occult queen of early 20th-century British Surrealism, and Edward Burra, the wry spectator of sexual and racial mores—working at the same time. Two separate exhibitions, in separate rooms in the same building. Why not hang their work side by side, add one of those fancy Xs people use these days (“Burra x Colquhoun” has a nice ring to it) and stand back to admire the results? Across town, the Barbican Centre gallery is showing sculptures by the late Alberto Giacometti cheek by jowl with 3D artwork from the very-much-alive Huma Bhabha. Then, in September, the space will show Giacometti’s forms alongside work by Mona Hatoum. And in February next year, the Barbican team will match Alberto’s stretchy figures with Lynda Benglis’ organic sculpted pieces. Cool, right? Meanwhile, back at Tate Britain, one ticket will get you access to both “Edward Burra” and “Ithell Colquhoun,” two exhibitions side-by-side but not quite touching.

Burra is a relatively unknown artist who certainly deserves an exhibition at a place as worthy as Tate Britain. Colquhoun is better known, has a cult following and—actually—the work on show here arrives after the same exhibition spent four months in the Tate’s Cornish outpost, Tate St Ives. Burra came from a boring English village and used his artwork to escape into exciting and seductive worlds. Colquhoun was born in India, sat at the feet of Surrealist kingpin André Breton and used automatism (allowing the unconscious mind to dictate artwork) to create her paintings.

Ithell Colquhoun first, then. Scylla (Méditerranée) from 1938 is here, of course. Colquhoun’s best-known painting showcases her interest in how the human body relates to the natural environment. The Scylla of Greek mythology was a sailor-eating female sea monster, so is this a painting of a woman lying in a rock pool? Is it two rocks in the sea? Is it supposed to look this phallic? Colquhoun, like Dalí, was good at this sort of thing: render a few juicy, fleshy forms in a desert-scape or in front of a discernible horizon and leave the viewer to make up their own mind. Gorgon, painted in 1946, and Earth Process from 1940 work the same angles. Her Attributes of the Moon from 1947 goes further, as clouds and hills join together to create a giant, striding humanoid figure.

There is also space for the Tarot card designs Colquhoun made in the 1970s. Her fascination with the occult had manifested in varying ways throughout her life, from joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a secret society that studied alchemy and thought God was a magician) to incorporating occult color theory (where every color has its own meaning) in her artwork. Colquhoun had moved into the realms of complete abstraction towards the end of her career, and she made her designs by dripping enamel paint on surfaces, then shaking and shuffling the wet paint around to create looming shapes and accidental color combos. While the process might seem elementary, the results are un-self-conscious in the tradition of automatism. Colquhoun’s design for the Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty Tarot card, for example, achieves the same organic quality she strived for in her more controlled paintings. Overall, Colquhoun’s output comes across as exquisitely eccentric, the work of an artist determined to fire their artwork beyond ordinary perception and onto metaphysical planes.

Far from otherworldly, Burra’s work was based on gossipy—sometimes gritty—reality. As Otto Dix used 1930s German society as the starting point for his busy, bitchy paintings, so Burra used his travels in the U.S. and Europe to provide subject matter for his. However, there was an extra layer to Burra’s themes. Look closely at the figures in Balcony, Toulon and Three Sailors at a Bar. Burra’s ladies on the balcony—unshaven of chin and broad in the shoulders—are men in drag. The sailors in the bar are eying one another lasciviously. While Burra never openly discussed his sexuality, his international travels took him to gay-friendly nightclubs, bars and hangouts, and these paintings are a joyous celebration of his findings.

By contrast, Burra was mooching about in Spain in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He loved Spain and, when he returned to England, he used his work to communicate his sorrow at the escalating conflict. The Watcher from 1938 shows sinister, anonymous figures facing off among crumbling castillo walls. The outbreak of the Second World War followed, and Burra reacted with a phenomenal work of art. His Soldiers at Rye painting from 1941 is combat in widescreen mode, as the painter’s masked warriors range and roam cinematically across the scene. Burra also hung out in Harlem and Boston before the Spanish Civil War broke out, soaking up the vibes of the burgeoning jazz age. Made in 1934, his The Band painting shows a big band in full swing, with accompanying jazz singers shimmying across the stage. This was the time of the Harlem Renaissance, when Black artists defied ingrained institutional and societal racism to take control of Harlem’s cultural narrative. Burra was on hand to record the defiance.

Times are hard right now, what with the global economy taking a continual battering. So perhaps the curators at Tate Britain are plugging into retail thinking here. If grocery stores can tempt their punters with buy one, get one free offers, then why shouldn’t institutions like Tate Britain do the same? While hanging the artists’ work directly beside one another might have been a more enticing prospect, with two gripping exhibitions for the price of one, what’s not to like?

“Edward Burra” and “Ithell Colquhoun” are at Tate Britain in London through October 19. Booking ahead is advised.

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As is the way with most countries, racism in the U.K. comes in waves. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonialism and involvement in the slave trade have bred a particular kind of British entitlement that runs red with discrimination. And, when times are hard, the next wave of racism crashes in, as sure as night follows day.

The economic slump during the late 1970s—and the resultant record high unemployment figures—opened the U.K. to a tsunamic wave of prejudice. Asked why the country was in the doldrums during a 1978 TV interview, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher blamed immigration. “The British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in,” she said. In short, it was all the foreigners’ fault. The hostility that followed was terrifying. Immigrant-owned businesses were attacked. Race-related riots ripped through the country. Fascist movements found a place in the mainstream. Right-wing media pushed anti-immigration agendas. Amidst the escalating violence, Black British female artist Lubaina Himid put together three exhibitions: “Five Black Women” at the Africa Centre in London in 1983, “Black Woman Time Now” at the Battersea Arts Centre the same year and “The Thin Black Line” at the ICA gallery (a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace) in 1985. All three shows featured artwork exclusively by Black and Asian female artists, and Himid has returned to the ICA with “Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985-2025,” which features all of the first survey’s eleven artists, but with artworks made before and since on view.

One of the most important artists in the U.K. art landscape today, Lubaina Himid is a testament to keeping going, despite the enormous obstacles hurled in front of Black British women artists over the years. She was the first Black woman to win what is arguably the U.K.’s prestigious art award, the Turner Prize, in 2017, and her new ICA project provides a fascinating insight into the career trajectories of the artists originally involved. More importantly, the new show is a chilling reminder that the poisonous waves of prejudice the artists endured during the 1980s have returned.

Another Turner Prize winner, Veronica Ryan’s Threads piece—crushed plastic bottles caught in a net of crocheted cotton—speaks of trafficking human souls across foreign seas. Brenda Agard’s three black and white photographs from 1985 and 1987 celebrate the success of Black women artists and photographers, despite the odds. The colliding effect of pastel drawings and collage in Jennifer Comrie’s 1987 artworks, Coming To Terms With Conflict, is both disturbing and intriguing. Marlene Smith’s Miss Pearl and Miss Mac: a day out is a life-size cutout of two ladies at a family wedding from Marlene’s family photo album. Taken in 1989 for the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography, Maud Sulter’s Polyhymnia (Portrait of Dr Ysaye Barnwell) photo depicts Dr. Barnwell as the Greek muse, Polyhymnia. D.r Barnwell holds a Master’s degree in public health and a PhD in speech pathology. She was also a singer for award-winning gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Painted in 1997, Lubaina Himid’s Venetian Maps series exposed the treasures from Africa lost in the history of Venice. Her Shoemakers canvas from the set is on display here. Created in 2022 to celebrate the ICA’s 75th anniversary (and as a reminder of the 1985 show), Lubaina’s The Thin Black Line ransom note-style print hangs nearby. Rice n Peas is a self-portrait made by Sonia Boyce in 1982. Sonia stares pensively out of the page, spoon in hand, as if she’s just taken a mouthful of food. Handwritten text below explains how Sonia’s mother tells her she needs to eat more, listing British meal staples like fish and chips alongside Caribbean food like salt fish and plantains. In 2016, Sonia became the first Black female member of that eminent British artists’ institution, The Royal Academy. And, in 2020, she represented the U.K. at the Venice Biennale—the first Black woman to do so.

Chila Kumari Burman’s A Moment to Herself from 2002 is a photo collage. Square tiles of vivid color make up a mosaic of objects from Chila’s apartment—bits of jewellery, sequins, flowers, lingerie and Hindu god decals. From this year, a clutch of Chila’s thrillingly elaborate neon pieces hang in the corridor next to the gallery. Ingrid Pollard began her Seventeen of Sixty-Eight project in 2018, collecting objects and photographs that represent the racial stereotyping of Black people in British culture over time. There were sixty-eight pubs in the U.K. with the words “Black Boy” somewhere in their name when the collection was started. The stained-glass representation of a young Black man here is typical of the type of decorative windows used in pubs. Across the room, Claudette Johnson’s paintings from 1986, Trilogy, are exquisitely defiant. Claudette was a Turner Prize finalist in 2024.

Sutapa Biswas’s Birdsong from 2004 is a surreal double-screen film installation focusing on figments of a child’s imagination. A racehorse stands next to a young boy in a posh drawing room modelled on those in ultra-British, colonial years paintings by John Constable and George Stubbs. Helen Cammock’s There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I & 2 2016 films trace the slave trade back to the Caribbean’s now-defunct sugar trade as a voice narrates the sights and sounds of Barbados. Made three years after the original ICA exhibition, Pratibha Parmar’s Sari Red film is a poetic memorial to Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, a young Indian woman who was killed in a racist attack in South London in 1985. Kalbinder had been out walking with friends when a gang of youths in a van began to shout racist abuse at them. Kalbinder shouted back. Incensed by her bravery, the youths drove their van into Kalbinder, crushing her to death against a wall.

Lubaina Himid’s steadfast work in pulling 1985’s “The Thin Black Line” exhibition together was a high-water mark in bringing Black and Asian female artists to the attention of the gallery-going public. Yet there is a brutal truth here. Even after the spread of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements—forty years after Lubaina’s first exhibition—there is so much more that needs to be done.

“Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025” is on now through September 7, 2025, at ICA London. Advanced booking is advised.

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What passes for eroticism these days? In an online world swamped with A.I. porn and social media influencers tripping over their ringlights to dole out intimacy tips, the definition of what is—and what is not—erotic in the twenty-first century is increasingly difficult to define. Leave it to London’s Courtauld Gallery, then, to take us back to simpler times. “Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams” brings together artwork originally chosen for the “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Curated by art critic Lucy Lippard, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams were the only women included in the New York show, and this retrospective strips out their male counterparts to let the three artists’ work shine. The title, incidentally, comes from the phrase Lippard used at the time to qualify and explain the artworks included.

Given the period the exhibition represents, the eroticism here is of the “oh my” variety—the kind of coy erotic experience that is gently hinted at rather than waved in viewers’ faces. At times, the coyness is so dialed up that it’s difficult to locate the artworks’ erotic heart. Displayed in a room of their own, the succession of untitled drawings Bourgeois made between 1968 and 1971 involves squiggly loops and jagged lines that could be anything from rocky landscapes to layers of flower petals. Is this Bourgeois finding eroticism in nature’s construct? Also, Alice Adams’ Resin Corner Pieces—a collection of seven sticks leaning against the wall—look more like the beginnings of a fence-building project than a treatise on erotica. The sticks are prophylactically covered in a thin layer of latex, though.

Thankfully, most of the artworks fulfil the brief completely. Big Aluminium I, Alice Adams’ twisty mesh tube from 1965, is a thing of great wonder. Dangling from the ceiling, it could be two fishnet stockings intersecting and has an alluringly sanguine feel, perfectly encapsulating how eroticism can be implied in abstract art. Also, there is something equally as alluring about her Threaded Drain Plate, created in 1964. After all, this is just a bunch of metal cord pushed through the holes of a metal plate. But somehow, it has a certain come-hither swagger about it. It’s easy to imagine the thing waggling an eyebrow suggestively while offering you a cigarette.

Created throughout the 1960s, Louise Bourgeois’ series of Hanging Janus sculptures mashed together male and female genitalia. The Hanging Janus here is firmly of the male variety. Fillette (Sweeter Version), made towards the end of the decade, continued her interest in this conflation. Most obviously phallic, the artwork’s name (fillette can be used to describe a young girl) and the thought that the pair of spheres at its base might represent female hips (as well as the obvious) introduces a seductive ambiguity. There are more implications and suggestions in Adams’ 22 Tangle, as a red woven wire circle slides up a mesh tube. Two Eva Hesse artworks from 1966, both untitled, raise the erotic game. For one, objects resembling a languid vanilla pod and a comely pear are just about touching, the pod slightly—deliciously—curling around the pear. Fruit and fauna have been used as erotic metaphors in art since the Renaissance, and Hesse’s second 1966 piece adds to the timeline, as three plum-shaped spheres hang in a webbing sack. Elsewhere, Adams’ Sheath from 1964 is reminiscent of a knotted, knitted primitive condom. Louise Bourgeois’ Tits from 1967 speak for themselves.

As this coyness feels rather dated, historical context is vital. Alice Adams was New York City born and bred, and Bourgeois and Hesse had become American citizens after relocating from France and Germany, respectively. Second-wave feminism was slowly gaining traction in America as advocates fought for substantive gender equality, but the three artists still had to spend their early careers proving women artists had just as much right as men to investigate themes of sexuality in their work. By the mid-1960s, Bourgeois had achieved a prominent position as an artist of renown, despite the male-dominated art world and social mores that expected her to stay barefoot and in the kitchen. Eva Hesse’s short career (she died of a brain tumor in 1970, aged thirty-four) was blighted by mental health problems as well as gender prejudice, yet her use of unconventional materials added new meanings to three-dimensional artwork. Alice Adams’ artwork shown in the “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition introduced a seismic change of direction. Here was an artist who brought a human warmth to the prevailing interest in architecturally influenced minimalist sculpture—and Alice is still making art in her early nineties. Asked later about the Bourgeois, Hesse and Adams artwork she picked for the original Fischbach Gallery show, Lucy Lippard said, “I can see now I was looking for feminist art.”

This is, admittedly, a pretty small exhibition at just two rooms; three if you include the space with the Bourgeois drawings. That said, the admission fee includes entry to the rest of the Courtauld’s galleries, where you can view Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, two of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings, several Degas canvases, some Cézannes, a Van Gogh self-portrait and many other works of note.

“Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams” is on view through September 14, 2025, at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Advanced booking is advised.

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Outside of Mexico, José María Velasco’s artwork is sparsely represented. Prague’s National Gallery owns a couple of his pieces, and there’s a painting from his Valley of Mexico series in the Vatican Museum. And that’s about it. None of his paintings figure in significant British art collections, and the last international Velasco exhibitions were held in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in 1976. Hats off, then, to London’s National Gallery for staging “José María Velasco: A View of Mexico”, a full-blown celebration of the painter’s canon in what is also—slightly surprisingly—the establishment’s first-ever bells-and-whistles treatment of a Latin American artist.

For those unfamiliar, José María Velasco is a Mexican hero. Just how much of a hero? He was born in the country’s Temascalcingo municipality in 1840, and the administrative town’s name was changed from San Miguel Temascalcingo to Temascalcingo de José María Velasco in 1945 in his honor. The town’s Centro Cultural José Martín Velasco is dedicated to his artwork. The Museo del Paisaje José María Velasco is located in Toluca de Lerdo, the capital of the State of Mexico. And the Galería José María Velasco in Mexico City is a public space hosting contemporary Mexican artists. His heroic standing comes down to his being the founder of Mexican nationalism in art, his skill in foregrounding the country’s landscape and the cultural platform he built for later Mexican artists, like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Velasco learned to paint in the mid-1850s at Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos, taught by Eugenio Landesio, an Italian artist well-versed in the European Romantic style (think Caspar David Friedrich’s swoon-inducing landscapes). Velasco was studying botany and geology at the same time, and Landesio helped him transfer his passion for nature onto canvas. By the 1870s, Velasco had begun work on his Valley of Mexico series, painting the highlands on the outer edges of Mexico City. The 1877 series installment, The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, includes two clues to his determination to champion Mexican nationalism. The nopal cactus and golden eagle had featured on the Mexican national flag since 1821, and Velasco added them here, drawing the eye to the bottom of the painting. Painted two years before, another Valley of Mexico painting is a rich exercise in perspective; a wide screen view that swings from bottom right to the snowy mountains in the background. It also works as an example of Velasco’s fascination with geology. The rocky outcrops in the painting are rendered faithfully, but zoom in and Velasco’s light touch becomes apparent. His brushwork is brisk and gestural and not as fiddly as it first appears. This was Velasco’s gift. Here is a painter who didn’t mess around. His wham-bam style melds similarly with his geological interests in the Rocas painting from 1894. Again, the rocks are rendered with Velasco’s faithful flourish, but check out the clouds above. They look like they have been painted by a man in a hurry to catch a bus and are all the better for that.

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In 1876, General Porfirio Díaz staged a military coup in Mexico, overthrowing the government and starting a ruling period of economic growth mixed with harsh authoritarianism. The years of Porfirio’s reign (characterized in history as Mexico’s Porfiriato era) brought industrialization to the country, and Velasco painted the shoots of change. Two paintings, The Goatherd of San Ángel from 1861 and 1863, narrate the appearance of a factory in the landscape. The river next to the factory has been dammed to capture a water supply for the building; smoke billows from the factory’s chimney. Back then, San Ángel was a tiny village outside Mexico City. Now, it’s an affluent neighborhood of the city. Painted in 1887, the new industrial complex in The Textile Mill of La Carolina, Puebla squats discreetly between dense vegetation and snow-covered volcanic peaks on the horizon.

Velasco also painted backward looks at Mexico’s socio-cultural history. The Baths of King Nezahualcóyotl represents one corner of an ancient Aztec botanical garden at the site of Texcotzingo, twenty miles outside Mexico City. It was yet another chance for Velasco to exercise his interest in depicting geology, as the bath’s chiseled curves and edges contrast with the crumbly rock outcrop. The pre-Aztec structures built in the ancient city of Teotihuacán grabbed Velasco’s imagination, too. The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán depicts Teotihuacán’s biggest manmade structure, and Velasco chose to paint it from above, giving an eagle’s eye view of the vast landscape around the pyramid. The same pyramid features in The Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, but this time Velasco arrives on foot and the sight of the twin structures reveals itself on the horizon as the undergrowth parts. All three paintings were created in 1878.

Velasco’s enthusiasm for botany is showcased throughout the exhibition. An early work from 1862, A Rustic Bridge in San Ángel, is less about the ridiculously rickety bridge and more about the majesty of the gnarly tree, its arm-like branches cradling the planks. The star of the show in Cardón, State of Oaxaca (painted in 1887) is a humongous cactus. Velasco has included a standing figure in its shade to make clear the sheer size of the thing. The Forest of Pacho from 1875 is a dense thicket of verdancy, and his unfinished study of Mafaffa Leaves is tender and careful.

As Velasco approached the end of his life, his style became looser and more works were left unfinished. Eruption, painted in oil on a blank postcard in 1910, is a messy, smudgy artwork that tilts towards Expressionism. That, incidentally, was the year General Porfirio Díaz’s reign ended and the decade-long Mexican Revolution sprang into life. José María Velasco died two years later. Also painted on a postcard and also unfinished, the story goes that he was working on Study of Clouds on the morning of the day he died.

“José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” works on several levels. His art is ubiquitous in Mexico, appearing on everything from mugs to placemats, and the exhibition illustrates why his paintings are such a source of national pride. Just as importantly, landscape painting can arguably be a bit boring, but Velasco’s work is very much not because he sumptuously communicates his passion for his native environment. Getting onboard with his brash, freewheeling way with paint makes for an absorbing experience. Maybe now, after championing Velasco’s exuberance, the National Gallery will stage more and equally enthralling exhibitions of South America’s rich culture.

“José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” is at the National Gallery in London through August 17, 2025. Beginning in September, the exhibition will be on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 2026.

The first time Maman appeared at the Tate Modern gallery in London, she wasn’t supposed to be the central attraction. Louise Bourgeois’s enormous bronze spider was part of a larger installation entitled “I Do, I Undo and I Redo,” commissioned to mark the opening of what has become one of the world’s most visited fine art galleries. Twenty-five years on and, while her creator may have gone—Bourgeois died in 2010—Maman is back with a sinister vengeance to mark Tate Modern’s quarter-century birthday.

Maman and the other elements of “I Do, I Undo and I Redo” were set up in the gallery’s Turbine Hall, so named because the original building was a power station and what is now the Tate Modern’s massive atrium and entrance hall once housed a water-driven turbine. Like London’s Fourth Plinth series, the Turbine Hall’s ongoing commission calendar has become a steady fixture of the U.K.’s art calendar. As with the Plinth artwork, the Turbine Hall commissions are temporary, staying in place for around six months. The main element of the “I Do, I Undo and I Redo” installation was actually a group of spiral staircases, but the sheer size and spookiness of the Bourgeois spider captivated cross-generational visitors. The most effective ensuing commissions were those that hit just as hard.

Take Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Turbine Hall commission, The Weather Project. Eliasson’s installation kit was simple: a bunch of mirrors, a sizeable half-circular screen, some lights and one of those machines that spray out artificial mist. The lights directed at the screen bounced off the mirrors to produce an intense, orange sun. The mist added a steamy, tropical vibe, and visitors took to spreading themselves out to bathe in the mock sun’s intense glow. Over two million people saw the piece, and one highlight came courtesy of a group of activists who lay on the floor and arranged their bodies into letters to spell out the phrase “Bush Go Home” in protest against George W.’s 2003 U.K. state visit.

Carsten Höller’s slides in 2006 continued the interactive larks. Named Test Site, the Swedish artist’s Turbine Hall installation consisted of five transparent, floor-to-ceiling slides that members of the public joyfully whizzed down, shrieking and waving to friends and family on the way. The following year, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth introduced a sense of disconcertion. Visitors entering the Turbine Hall spotted a hairline crack in the space’s concrete floor. The further the crack traveled into the hall, the longer, wider and deeper it became, until it revealed its entire 167-meter length and was big enough to swallow up anyone who wasn’t watching what they were doing.

Ai Weiwei’s 2010 commission, Sunflower Seeds, was a testament to his ability to use art to communicate ideas in accessible ways. The 100 million sunflower seeds that covered the Turbine Hall’s floor were made of porcelain in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, and visitors were encouraged to walk across the shifting carpet the seeds created. Unfortunately (and unintentionally), the seeds arrived covered in dust, and the gallery decided to cordon off the installation to stop visitors from inhaling porcelain motes.

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The original Tate gallery was founded with money donated by Henry Tate, a nineteenth-century sugar trader and one-half of the sweetmeat manufacturer, Tate and Lyle. In 2018, several British institutions came under scrutiny for their potential involvement in the slave trade, and the Tate organization was put under the microscope. Research led to absolution—a statement noted Henry Tate and Abram Lyle were twelve and fourteen years old, respectively, when slavery was abolished in 1833. However, the scrutiny shone fresh light on just how many of the Turbine Hall commissions were addressing human rights and environmental issues. Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth was a comment on migration and immigration, for example, the depths of the crack revealing the darkness of racism. Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds addressed mass consumption and racial stereotypes. Far from the commonly-held perceptions of cheapness and poor quality associated with the “Made in China” label, the installation’s seeds were handmade by gifted craftspeople living in an area of China renowned for its exquisite porcelain pottery.

When Cuban artist Tania Bruguera was invited to create a Turbine Hall commission in 2018, she also used the chance to confront attitudes around immigration. Bruguera placed a heat-sensitive layer over the hall’s floor; the longer people laid upon it, the more a blown-up portrait of a young Syrian refugee called Yousef began to emerge beneath them. Yousef had fled Syria for London, and the presence of corporeal warmth unveiled the potential organic empathy of human kindness—a lesson on how to make a fellow mortal feel seen. Anyone left unmoved by the piece could visit a crying room, wherein a harmless vapor was pumped into a space next to the floor, forcing tears from visitors’ eyes as if they were peeling an onion. The title of Bruguera’s commission—10 148 451—came from the number of people who migrated from their country in 2017 added to the number of migrant deaths in 2018 at the time when the project was installed. That number has been increasing ever since.

U.S. artist Kara Walker’s 2019 Turbine Hall commission elegantly addressed the horrors of the British Empire. Entitled Fons Americanus, the installation’s central focus was a thirteen-meter-high fountain based on the Victoria Memorial stationed in front of Buckingham Palace. British colonialism accelerated under Queen Victoria’s reign, and the original memorial is a pompous, overblown statue intended to honor the period. For Walker’s remix, the memorial became a fountain, and the water gushing out of the figure at its top (and various others around its sides) referenced the seas traveled by nineteenth-century British slave traders as they dragged their human cargo into the hell of new worlds. Details sculpted into the fountain’s structure included a noose hanging off a tree’s branch and a military captain representing the brave Black individuals who fought against the slave trade.

Last year’s commission, El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon, also centered around interrogations of slavery. The Ghana-born, Nigeria-based artist and his team linked, knitted and entwined old bottle tops and discarded ephemera into huge flapping banners and meshes. By using the kind of flotsam that washes up along coastlines worldwide, El Anatsui was also underscoring how our oceans were (and still are) used to transport and abandon trafficked human beings.

The next Turbine Hall commission will be taken on by Máret Ánne Sara. Born in the ancient Sápmi territory that stretches across Norway, Finland, Sweden and parts of Russia, Sara’s work confronts the obliteration of traditional cultural values in the face of present-day colonialism. Much like the citizens of Greenland, the people of Sápmi never asked for their lives to be changed without their permission. Long may the good work enabled by the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commissions continue.

Twenty-fifth anniversary events are taking place at the Tate Modern throughout 2025. Máret Ánne Sara’s Turbine Hall commission runs from October 14 this year through April 6, 2026. 

It wasn’t the California wildfires that closed down the Underground Museum in Los Angeles; it was grief. In a heartbreaking announcement posted on the museum’s website this past January, the artist Karon Davis, Noah Davis’ wife, explained why her family closed the art space the couple founded in 2012. Her husband passed away from cancer in 2015, Karon’s note explained, and the family needed more time to deal with their pain. The Underground Museum, already sorely missed, was a realization of Noah Davis’ intent. The U.K.’s first retrospective of his artwork, titled simply “Noah Davis” at London’s Barbican Art Gallery, provides a moving insight into the workings of both intent and institution.

A charming film in the exhibition space shows Davis (b. 1983 in Seattle) telling an interviewer how he was born to paint. Following a move to Los Angeles in 2004 after dropping out of New York’s Cooper Union School of Art, his breakthrough as an artist came four years later when long-time supporter and gallery director Lindsay Charlwood included three of his paintings in a group exhibition. Davis was going through a brief dalliance with abstract painting, and there’s a room dedicated to that period—although only one painting survives: a canvas of flat color. His time with abstraction done, Davis returned to the kind of haunting work characterized by 2007’s 40 Acres and a Unicorn. A wry comment on the U.S. government’s promise of land and a mule to slaves granted their freedom in 1865, replacing the paltry and patronizingly-mooted farm animal incentive with a unicorn sums up the quiet irony and elegance in Davis’s paintings.

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The room next door is dedicated to the Underground Museum. Noah and Karon Davis founded the art space in the working-class Arlington Heights district in L.A. with the intention of making high-quality art more accessible to the largely Black and Latinx local community. “I like the idea of bringing a high-end gallery into a place that has no cultural outlets within walking distance,” Noah Davis told Art In America in 2013. However, when the pair approached museums and galleries to ask about borrowing artwork to exhibit in the new space, the response was almost overwhelmingly negative. So they got to work, and an exhibition, “Imitation of Wealth,” presented perfect replicas of artwork by the likes of Jeff Koons, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson. William Kentridge was more than happy to contribute to the Underground Museum (Kentridge’s film Journey to the Moon is at the Barbican, playing on a loop) and after he got the nod from Kentridge in 2014, Davis commented how ironic—that word again—it was that the first artist to agree to exhibit in a museum created by Black artists was white.   

Davis was fascinated by mysticism, and his Gods of the Afterlife 2009 series of paintings reflects his interest in ancient Egyptian religion and mythology. Isis shows a young girl in a dancer’s outfit, delicately lifting her golden wings. Interpreted from a photograph, the figure wrapped in mummy-esque pajamas in 1984 is his wife as a six-year-old child. The economy of the painter’s limited palette here gives his artwork an elusive feeling. The colors used are muted throughout, and Davis didn’t concern himself with details like facial features or the faithful depiction of environments. Instead, paint drips and lollops across his canvases, fading in and out like memories.

Davis’s imagination flicked between paradigms of idealism and society’s hard truths. His 2012 Savage Wilds paintings came from American daytime television’s racist and misogynistic representations of Black people. He would pause recordings of shows like The Jerry Springer Show and Judge Judy and paint what he saw in the frozen frames. The figures he produced are vague, often overweight and somehow hapless.

For his 2013 project—in which all pieces are entitled 1975—Davis made paintings based on more family photos. At odds with the synthesized portrayals of folk in Savage Wilds, 1975 is an archive of everyday life that hums with intimacy as people swim, play and go about their business.

The Pueblo del Rio paintings from the following year are based on the 1941 design for a Los Angeles housing project for Black defense workers. Davis imagined how the project could have been, and the artworks embody a calm utopia, replete with white-gloved ballet dancers, musicians and wonderous public sculptures. In reality, the housing project deteriorated into one of L.A.’s most violent and impoverished districts. Around the corner, Seventy Works is a series of 2D mixed media pieces Davis made while undergoing chemotherapy. Some were sold to help his family cover the costs of his medical treatment, while others were given as gifts to friends.

Even as the survey in London is comprehensive, there is so much left unsaid in Noah Davis’ work. Untitled from 2015 was painted three months before he died. A woman and girl lie asleep on a couch, and we view them through an open door. Are we intruding? Are they okay? The effect is disconcerting, and for an artwork to have this kind of impact is a reflection of Davis’s remarkable gift for beginning a story but leaving the plot unresolved. As with the best societal narrators, Davis showed without telling, depicting scenarios that are both troubling and enthralling.

Noah Davis was just thirty-two when he died. We can only hope that his family finds peace and that when they are ready, the Underground Museum will reopen once again.

Noah Davis‘ largest survey to date is on view at the Barbican Centre in London through May 11, 2025. Advanced booking is recommended.

When U.K. punk band the Buzzcocks were looking for cover art for their 1977 Orgasm Addict single, twenty-three-year-old Linda Mulvey had just completed a graphic design degree at Manchester Polytechnic. The band settled on one of Mulvey’s untitled photomontages for their cover—a naked female torso with a steam iron instead of a head. A year later, Linder changed her first name, jettisoned her family name and formed her own band. Ludus was a fiercely experimental musical collective that gave Linder a platform to express her anger at the commodification of women’s bodies and admiration for the performative vocal experiments of Yoko Ono and Meredith Monk. Taking its name from the 1982 Ludus album, “Danger Came Smiling” at London’s Hayward Gallery is Linder’s biggest exhibition to date, a retrospective that covers everything from the artist’s time as a member of Manchester’s post-punk sovereignty through to her current position as Brit art national treasure.

There are two versions of the Orgasm Addict artwork on show here—the original color montage and an imposing, ceiling-height print (freshly titled It’s The Buzz, Cock! in 2015). The piece sets the exhibition’s tone. The majority of Linder’s work revolves around her collaging like a Dada mistress, and the gallery’s walls are lined with dozens of re-arranged black and white self-portraits and photomontages made using clippings from porn and women’s interest magazines. Linder’s early-career success came from her ability to poke fun at the male gaze, starting with the paradoxical hypocrisy of prevailing pearl-clutching taboos around sex and the blatant daily objectification and exploitation of women. And, like Barbara Kruger in the U.S., Linder’s take on feminism was constructed using photocopiers, scalpels and glue. Thus, male appendages in her images are covered by cut-out pot plants and domestic appliances, while pink and purple lilies preserve the modesty of languid female porn stars. It’s pretty funny, like when Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa, only with added nudity and food mixers. Linder’s Buzzcocks intro and early-1980s Ludus gigs led to other music-related projects. The glass cases on show contain portrait photos of Howard Devoto (Buzzcocks founder member and mainstay of avant-rockers, Magazine), designs for Magazine record covers, a flier for a 1978 Joy Division gig and drawings of punk muse and Vivienne Westwood store assistant Jordan, a.k.a., Pamela Rouke.

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The 1990s were a quiet time for Linder, and the exhibition neatly skips forward to the mid-2000s as porn and fetishism continued to work as a conduit for her deep dives into social psyches. In 2011 she created a series of photographs after finding Splosh!, a magazine dedicated to sploshing, the fetish of covering the naked self in food. In Action Rituelle des Ancêtres, the artist and an unnamed other drip gloopily in rainbows of sauce, gravy and custard.

2013 saw a kind of Linder revival as various museums and galleries twigged to her importance—even though the clues had been there all the time. After all, this was the performer who made a raw meat dress to wear when she sang with Ludus decades before Lady Gaga wore her own meat dress to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. There were 2013 Linder exhibitions featuring new and revisited work at the U.K.’s Hepworth Gallery and Tate St Ives, and The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris staged “Femme/Objet,” the first full-scale Linder retrospective the same year. As public interest grew, the artist’s reflections on her performance background percolated to the surface. In 2013 she created The Ultimate Form, her first ballet in collaboration with choreographer Kenneth Tindall, and costumes designed for the dance are on display. Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes is also here, a magnificent serpentine embroidery used in another Linder/Tindall ballet collaboration, Children of the Mantic Stain, this time from 2016.

Placed on top of a glass case next to the ballet costumes and assembled by Linder in 2023, L’effet de la curiosité féminine (The Effect of Feminine Curiosity) is an Angela Carter-like examination of women’s representation. Its bell-jarred contents of gilt leaves and vanity mirror is a globe de mariée, a decorative gift given to wealthy brides in nineteenth-century France. The base of the globe is slammed down tightly to trap a length of hair sourced from China and bleached blonde to conform to Western standards. Other newer works include The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time, a 2025 work that finds Linder riffing on Salvador Dalí’s Shirley Temple: The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time from 1939. In the source material, Dalí added the head of child star Shirley Temple to a sphinx. In a time when deepfakes—particularly those using pornographic images—are a grave concern for women, Linder’s reworking of herself as the sphinx’s head is apt. The work also shows how prescient Linder’s early experiments were as an artist provocateur born of a time when disruption was an art in itself. And, like Dalí, Linder the human being is as much a piece of art as the work she’s made. In mirroring punk culture’s anarchic dialectics, Linder was the precursor of the influencer—albeit a raucous, heterodoxic one. She’s a figure who puts herself at the center of the conversation, garlanding the world she creates with her art along the way.

“Linder: Danger Came Smiling” is at the Hayward Gallery in London through May 5, 2025. Advance booking is recommended.

Brazilian Modernism in art was born out of nationalistic pride. Isolated from contemporary international creative developments until the early 1910s, Brazilian art traditionally revolved around religious iconography, portraiture and landscapes. Brazilian art academies were fiercely protectionist, viewing any new international art movement as radical and, therefore, at odds with their country’s traditions. Plus, Brazil was experiencing an economic boom orchestrated by wealthy industrialists, and the national exhibitions the nouveau riche funded reflected their conservative tastes. Brazilian Modernism propelled the country’s national artistic identity into the new century, and “Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism,” a group exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, takes a lingering look at the artists who brought a freer, more contemporary sense of self-identity to the country’s art legacy.

Modernism in painting had been bubbling in Europe from the 1860s as art moved away from formal, story-telling tropes towards work that explored how paint could be more expressive and expansive. By the 1910s, Paris and Berlin were hotbeds of Modernism as Picasso, Braque, Kirchner and others smashed through painterly boundaries. Born in São Paulo in 1889, Brazilian artist Anita Malfatti’s 1912 visit to Europe blew her mind. Ending up in Berlin, she immersed herself in the new art ideas and, when she returned to Brazil, blended them into her paintings. Malfatti became a member of Grupo dos Cinco, a collective of artists and writers working towards shaking off old-school ideas that included fellow painter Tarsila do Amaral. The Grupo dos Cinco were the first Brazilian Modernists, and Malfatti and do Amaral are key figures among the ten artists in the Academy’s show.

Brazil’s Modernist timeline is a long one. Starting in earnest in the early twentieth century, it’s generally agreed that the movement petered out at the start of the 1970s, and the Academy’s exhibition succeeds in illustrating how Brazilian Modernist art became looser and more colorful as time passed. Tarsila do Amaral’s artworks show this flowering, and her Lake painting from 1928 is a glorious celebration of nature that’s at odds with her introspective portrait work—like the painting of poet and Grupo dos Cinco member Oswald de Andrade—from six years before.

Anita Malfatti also painted Oswald de Andrade, and her rendering shows how the Brazilian Modernists were embracing fresh takes on paint manipulation. Malfatti’s Oswald is on the move, traversing the canvas in front of an energetic background of intersecting planes of color. Similarly, Flávio de Carvalho used portraiture to push his practice forward. His portrait of Mário de Andrade (another Grupo dos Cinco poet and stalwart) from 1939 is a fuzzy exercise in cutting loose with a paintbrush. Flávio de Carvalho was a wild card. Starting out as an architect and engineer, his artistic excursions included Experience N. 2, Brazil’s first act of performance art in which he walked the opposite way of a religious procession (very frowned upon), flirting with women as he wended through the crowd (even worse).

Lasar Segall and Vicente do Rego Monteiro were contemporaries of Malfatti and do Amaral. Born in Lithuania in 1891 and educated in Germany, Segall moved to São Paulo in 1912, bringing his experience of European Expressionism with him. In Banana Plantation, painted in 1927, Segall acknowledges the presence of African culture brought to Brazil following the trafficking of slaves from Africa to the country by Portuguese colonists. A plantation worker stares stoically from the canvas, seemingly close to drowning in the banana plants around him. Vicente do Rego Monteiro exhibited alongside Segall and Malfatti in the 1920s, and his roundly painted human figures—like Archer from 1925—recall the curving forms of British Modernists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

Working during the Second World War, Candido Portinari’s output had its basis in the gulf between the rich and the poor in Brazil. He used drawings and paintings of scarecrows to convey the plight of his country’s impoverished people, and his 1940 painting The Scarecrow is of a young girl in ragged clothes. In contrast, Alfredo Volpi reduced his paintings down to simple, geometric forms. His Untitled piece from 1950 is a mixture of willful naivety and trompe l’oeil as its triangles appear to vibrate and shudder against their blue grounding. Geraldo de Barros was also intrigued by geometry and the trajectory of shapes, and the title of his Arrangement of Three Similar Shapes within a Circle artwork tells it like it is: a pinwheeling ice-cream swirl of flat color.

Djanira da Motta e Silva is the third female artist in the survey. Known simply as Djanira, her Three Orishas painting from 1966 is a showstopper. Brazilian Modernism was established as a formidable force by the 1960s, and Djanira has spent time in New York, where she hung out with Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. As with Segall, she represented the influence of African culture on her country, and her Three Orishas painting shows a trio of orishas, or West African goddesses, looming imperiously in front of a pair of drummers. Rubem Valentim also found inspiration in the orisha myths. The only artist showcased here who worked in three—as well as two—dimensions, Valentim’s orishas are unrecognizably cubic in his oil paintings and totem-like in his wooden cut-outs and carvings. Made in 1980, Emblematic Sacral Alter Set – E59 is one of a long series of Valentim sculptures that he saw as holy tributes to the African deities.   

In all, “Brasil! Brasil!” is a steady show but there’s a staid quality to its staging. In 2022, the Royal Academy held a William Kentridge retrospective, and the whole deal was a spell-binding treat. Lighting bounced from intense to subtle as the exhibition unfolded, and Kentridge’s creations were presented in a kind of well-managed chaos. There’s none of that playfulness or chaos here, which is a shame given the vibrancy and dynamism of the artwork on show.

“Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism” is at the Royal Academy in London through April 21, 2025. Advance booking is recommended.

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• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Chiharu Shiota Weaves Historical Memory, Body and Belonging in “Two Home Countries”

The star of Takashi Murakami’s new London show is Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP. At over thirteen meters long and three meters high, the artwork’s source material is a 17th-century mural depiction of daily life in Kyoto. Artist Iwasa Matabei’s faded original sits in the Tokyo National Museum, while Murakami’s updated version gathers contemporary plaudits. As well it should. It’s quite something, the sort of artwork that elicits short gasps of pleasure.

“Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” at Gagosian’s Mayfair branch in London showcases the Japanese polymathic artist in remix mode as he updates important pieces from his country’s artistic past. For Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP, Murakami has added his own anime-inspired, gaudily goofy characters to an ancient landscape already teeming with human activity. Thus, Murakami’s grinning sunflowers and funny little monsters mingle with Kyoto locals in a painterly aerial view of centuries-spanning carnival chaos, all on a ground of gold and platinum leaf. Matabei was a ki (eccentric or fantastical) artist revered for his unconventional, cartoonish style of painting and the perfect foil for Murakami’s own mischief.

If this mixing of high art with modern design sounds a bit disrespectful, it might not help to know that Takashi Murakami has been embracing galloping commerciality from the get-go, and it’s serving him well, thanks very much. He studied nihonga (the Japanese art of incorporating various ancient art techniques in painting) at the Tokyo University of the Arts in the early 1990s and used his learnings to invent Japanese answers to Disneyfied Western pop culture soon after. Mr. DOB, his take on Mickey Mouse, crops up throughout his work, as do his stoned-looking mushrooms, the aforementioned smiley flowers and a whole cavalcade of googly-eyed skulls. He also worked out that collaborations are another key to early success. In 2005, he started working with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton on a logo redesign, and the line of Vuitton/Murakami-designed fashion accessories that followed has just been reissued worldwide with ubiquitous actor and social media maven, Zendaya, as the initiative’s ambassador.

Other collaborations ensued—footwear designs for Crocs and Vans, accessories with Billie Eilish, watches with Casio and album artwork for the likes of A$AP Rocky, canceled rap edgelord Kanye West and others—and the “Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” exhibition is the artist’s opportunity to remind the world that his commitment to nihonga has never gone away. The ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock printing), Manga comic design and anime elements he uses in his projects pop up like critters in a whack-a-mole game or dominate artworks completely. Maiko in Springtime Kyoto turns the traditional painting subject of a maiko (young geisha trainee) into a Manga heroine. Kaikai Kiki Style “Karajishi-zu Byōbu” is a two-panel take on sixteenth-century painter Kanō Eitoku’s Chinese Lions. Murakami’s lions maintain the vitality and power of Eitoku’s original as they leap across the gallery wall. The central creatures in the Flaming Vermillion Bird, Blue Dragon Soars Through the Universe, White Tiger and Family and Black Tortoise and Arhats artworks are based on four guardian gods from the Chinese philosophy that had bled into Japanese tradition in ancient times. The creatures came to represent four municipalities in Kyoto in the eighth century and Murakami’s preening, seething modern-day reimaginings are suitably cosmic.  

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Re: “Daigo-Hanami-zu-Byōbu rethinks an anonymous depiction of the last days in the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi painted in the late 1700s. A samurai warrior and feudal lord, Hideyoshi was the inspiration for the character Taikō in the recent award-winning TV series Shōgun, and Murakami embeds his appreciation for the drama in a relatively restrained (for him) view of the warrior and his clan in a cherry blossom garden. There are subtle reminders of Hideyoshi’s warmongering career in the army camouflage textures used to render hills around the garden’s horizon.

All the artworks on view were created by Murakami and his team in 2024, and while the exhibition notes tell that the materials used were acrylic paint and precious metal leaf, closer inspection reveals areas that could only have been generated by software. This is neither a surprise nor a problem. Murakami is open about his use of artificial intelligence in his work, and it would be odd if an artist living on the very edge of the zeitgeist wasn’t getting the best out of the latest image-making technology. Golden Pavilion, for example, includes cookie-cutter variations of the camouflage textures seen in Re: “Daigo-Hanami-zu-Byōbu” and the backgrounds of the other artworks. Resembling a beautiful, highly-finished still from a Studio Ghibli animation, Murakami’s pavilion appears to float on top of its own swirling, watery reflection.           

“Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” is art as titivation, with Murakami adding kitsch and cool to fondly remembered glories without weighing the whole thing down with hidden meanings or fancy concepts, historical techniques and references aside. And that’s why being sniffy here would be like telling a kitten off for being cute. If the point of art is, in part, to give pure, unalloyed delight, then Murakami’s new work pulls it off and then some. And, by constantly remixing his kaleidoscope of influences, his output fits neatly into the envied sweet spot between what people like to buy in stores, what they enjoy looking at in public art galleries and what the wealthy can afford to hang at home. It’s just a shame that the Gagosian’s atmosphere feels kind of formal and rarified for art as decorous as this. Dedicating one sober-suited security guard to each piece in the gallery seems excessive, the space’s plain concrete walls look doubly drab behind such vibrant art, and the absence of any kind of merchandise is baffling, given that Murakami is as happy designing keyrings and t-shirts as he is conceiving and completing grand-scale paintings. Perhaps one of London’s bigger art institutions should take glitches like these as a cue to recognize the contribution Takashi Murakami is making to 21st-century culture and grant him the high-definition, no-holds-barred exhibition he deserves.

“Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” is on view through March 8 at Gagosian in Grosvenor Hill, London.

After discovering natural springs on his land in the Islington area of North London in the eighteenth century, Richard Sadler opened his gardens to the public and allowed them to sample the mineral water from the wells he’d built. As visitors flocked to the Sadler residency in Rosebery Avenue, he added live entertainment for their engagement, including music recitals, dance performances and wrestling. The Sadler’s Wells Theatre that followed gained a reputation for showing audiences a good time, but the endeavor was mismanaged. At the close of the 19th Century, Sadler’s theater had crumbled into dereliction.

Enter the remarkable Lilian Baylis. The impresario had already breathed new life into London’s famous Old Vic theater and was eager for the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to fulfill the possibilities she envisaged for the place. In 1925 Baylis raised enough money to buy the theater, and by the end of the 1930s, the in-house ballet company she had assembled counted the likes of superstar ballerinas Margot Fonteyn and Alicia Markova in its number. Their crowd-pulling power and box office-busting performances at Sadler’s Wells prompted Baylis to stop using the theater for any other forms of entertainment (the likes of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson had acted in Shakespeare plays there) and double down on dance productions. Lilian Baylis was proud of her achievements, and rightly so. In Elizabeth Schafer’s 2006 biography, she relates that when Miss Lilian Baylis was hurt in a car accident, an onlooker shouted, “It’s Miss Baylis. Miss Baylis of the Old Vic.” Despite her predicament, Baylis straightened up and corrected them, “AND Sadler’s Wells.” Thanks to Lilian Baylis’s foresight and acumen, Sadler’s Wells Theatre is one of the world’s best-known, most revered dance venues, and the organization is celebrating the opening of its new London site, Sadler’s Wells East.

Before the U.K. capital took its turn to host the Olympics in 2012, the British government had committed to using the sporting infrastructure built in the area of Stratford in East London—named Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park—to further the city’s reputation as an international cultural destination. Stratford and its surrounding London boroughs had been neglected; the Olympics offered an opportunity for regeneration and it’s here that Sadler’s Wells East has landed. The move would have pleased Lilian Baylis, whose motto was “dare, always dare.” While the original Islington theater retains its grandeur, it underwent major modernization in 1998 to move with the times (adding the 180-seater Lilian Baylis Studio in the process), and the new East London site sparkles with the same potential. The architects for the Sadler’s Wells East project build, O’Donnell + Tuomey, have already augmented London’s arts landscape. The team behind the successful relocation of the Photographer’s Gallery from Covent Garden to Soho in 2012, they’re also working on a new branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum, V&A East, set to be built in the same Olympic Park complex as the new Sadler’s Wells space. Other new neighbors include the BBC Music Studios and the London College of Fashion.

The second Sadler’s Wells site arrives on a wave of historical confidence earned by the Roseberry Avenue venue. Merce Cunningham danced there to a live score by John Cage in 1985. Mikhail Baryshnikov took the Sadler’s Wells stage in 1993 with his White Oak Dance Project. The Martha Graham Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater have performed in the space, and the original theater remains the go-to stage for international dance companies on tour. British dance pioneer Sir Matthew Bourne’s company is a regular booking, as are the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Carlos Acosta’s Acosta Danza troupe. The late lamented German experimental dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch chose Sadler’s Wells as the U.K. stopover for her Tanztheater Wuppertal troupe’s glorious performances. In November last year, the Senegal-based company L’Ecole des Sables staged Bausch’s epoch-making 1975 production The Rite of Spring there. (Based on Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet score, Bausch’s version calls for the theater’s stage to be covered in an ankle-deep layer of soil).

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Global reputation aside, the Sadler’s Wells Theatre also champions community-based talent, and the East London site will invest here, too. In July of this year, both venues will share hosting duties for the inaugural YFX Youth Festival, a new annual dance festival that sets out to celebrate dance and choreographic youth work from across the U.K. The series of events will include the London premiere of England’s National Youth Dance Company’s new as yet untitled work by Olivier Award-winning hip-hop dance company Boy Blue. Led by producer and musician Michael Asante and choreographer Kenrick Sandy, Boy Blue does crucial work, using dance to explore social tensions and cultural identity. Sandy was awarded an MBE for services to dance and the community in 2017 with Asante receiving the same honor for services to music five years later. The YFX Youth Festival will also showcase Sadler’s Wells’ Making Moves initiative, a new choreography and performance outreach project for forty-eight schools and youth groups from across England, and One Dance U.K.’s Young Creatives enterprise, a national program that helps young choreographers develop their ideas.

In the meantime, Sadler’s Wells East opens with choreographer Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu’s Our Mighty Groove, an immersive performance that blends club and dance music genres—house, vogue and waacking—with African dance. During Sadler’s Wells East’s planning stages, the architects committed to creating a building that could incorporate outlandish ideas. In March, the space will become a metaverse for the Ballet National de Marseille’s virtual video game experience, Age of Content, and in April, the auditorium will be converted into a skatepark for a new work from Danish dance-maker Mette Ingvartsen. As the U.K. arts scene suffers crisis after crisis under extraordinary funding cuts and the country lurches from one social media-fueled culture war to another, it’s comforting to know that Sadler’s Wells is daring to expand its commitment to new ideas in dance and performance.

When the Mughal empress Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631, her husband Shah Jahan built a mausoleum in her memory. The Great Mughals didn’t do things by halves, and Mumtaz Mahal’s final resting place, the Taj Mahal (building cost at the time: 32 million rupees, or $750 million, in today’s money) in Agra, India, remains a touchstone of architectural elegance. Shah Jahan, his father Jahangir and his grandfather Akbar were the Great Mughals, the early emperors of the mighty Mughal dynasty that sprawled across the Indian subcontinent (that then included Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Bangladesh) and ruled from 1526 until 1858. The emperors’ elevation from mere garden variety Mughals to greatness comes from their patronage of beautiful things, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London’s “The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence” exhibition applauds the trio’s creative and cultural achievements.

The V&A is the ideal backdrop for the show. Built as another royal tribute—to Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert—just before the Mughals’ dynastic period collapsed, the museum is a graceful, imposing jewel in London’s institutional arts crown. Inside, the exhibition’s curators have gone to town, assembling a dizzying array of objects and artwork commissioned by the emperors to tell the story of the dynasty.

Arranged over three sections, “The Great Mughals” covers the eras of Akbar (who reigned from 1556 until 1605), Jahangir (1605-1627) and Shah Jahan (1627-1666). Akbar ascended the throne aged just thirteen and a Mughal military commander, Bairam Khan, ruled on his behalf until Akbar was deemed old enough to take charge of the empire. Akbar’s achievements were many and notable. Under his ruling tenure, religious tolerance became the norm, he introduced administrative structures that lasted long into the future and his appreciation for the arts permeated across his domain. Artifacts on display include volumes of the Hamzanama (Book of Hamza), commissioned by Akbar in the 1570s. Folkloric tales and battle stories are depicted within: an illustration of the mythical giant Zumurrud Shah vanquishing his foes teems with action. Walls are hung with serried ranks of contemporaneous paintings. A suitably regal representation of Akbar handing the imperial crown to Shah Jahan is bordered with decorous gold leaf. A two-meter-long carpet–on view in the U.K. for the first time–almost takes up an entire wall across the room and shows the myth of the gajasimha (a winged beast with the body of a lion and an elephant’s head) under attack from the phoenix-like simurgh. It’s stunning.

The objects selected for Jahangir’s turn include his jade-hilted dagger, its scabbard set with rubies, emeralds and a pearl, a jade wine cup inscribed with Jahangir’s titles and Persian verses in praise of wine and a Mughal hunting coat. The coat is exquisitely embroidered with prey—tigers, leopards, deer and hares—and curling foliage across panels of white silk. Jahangir took artists with him as his court traveled across the empire, and there’s a space dedicated to their pictorial documentations, including a delicate painting of a zebra made by famed Mughal court artist Ustad Mansur. Other paintings convey the dynasty’s cosmopolitan edge. The portrait of a visiting European, possibly a Portuguese ambassador passing through to pay his respects, is brimming with color and depth.

The Shah Jahan section begins with a video of the Taj Mahal. Beneath is one of the original marble maquettes for Mumtaz Mahal’s cenotaph with tenderly rendered watercolor designs for the tomb’s ornamental inlays alongside. Precious gems are posed on pins in a case nearby. A carved ruby the size of a quail’s egg stands next to cut diamonds, all of which were once part of the emperor’s jeweled throne. In the case next door are four beads, two made from emeralds and one each carved from a sapphire and an aquamarine. Being so close to such dazzling stones feels quietly thrilling. The perusing visitors’ gentle, hushed gasps at the exhibits mingle with the show’s sounds piped in from above. Hypnotic sitars hazily drone and twang. Birds warble, and there’s the occasional thunk of hammers hitting metal and stone, recreating the ambiance of the Mughals’ artisanal workshops and palace gardens.

“Great Mughals” is an exhibition that unashamedly celebrates excess as well as accomplishments. As for how the emperors gained their riches, some historians suggest it was through prurient economic policies and the aforementioned open-hearted approach to matters of faith. Others argue the emperors were warmongering empire builders who subjugated their people. Certainly, not everything was hearts and flowers in the Great Mughals’ universe. Mumtaz Mahal bled to death after giving birth to her fourteenth child, and her husband spent his last eight years in prison on the orders of his third son, Aurangzeb. Shah Jahan appointed another son, Dara Shikoh, as his successor, and Aurangazeb slaughtered Dara Shikoh, along with his other brothers, to claim the throne. By 1858, the Mughal Dynasty died out, having succumbed, in part, to the U.K.’s state-sponsored colonization of the Indian subcontinent under the guise of the British East India Company.

Explanations of just how the Mughals became so wealthy and all-conquering are sidestepped here. Rather, text by the exhibition’s exit proudly reminds departing visitors that the word Mughal is a derivation of Mogul (Genghis Khan was a distant cousin of the Great Mughals)—and a 21st-century mogul is someone who has achieved power and success. Perhaps that’s the point: raking over the emperors’ politics can happen somewhere else. In the meantime, “The Great Mughals” offers the chance to leave all the bad stuff in the cold outside and immerse oneself in a dreamy collection of some of the most opulent and indulgent pieces in world history.

“The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence” is at the V&A in South Kensington, London through May 5, 2025. Advanced booking is advised.

Brion Gysin thought big. Not content with the new generation of television sets that were landing in homes across the Western world, in 1958, the late British-Canadian artist and writer invented his Dreamachine, a rotating cylinder with lights inside created in consultation with his friends William Burroughs and electronics whizz Ian Somerville. The idea was that a viewer would sit in front of the Dreamachine and close their eyes. As it spun around (either at 45 or 33 RPM—it sat on a record turntable), the machine’s flickering lights would somehow evoke patterns in the viewer’s mind. Gysin had hoped the contraption would replace the television as the international go-to entertainment system, but time, technology and the fact that people can’t see with their eyes shut worked against him. Nonetheless, Gysin’s aptitude for thinking outside the box fits neatly into “Electric Dreams” at London’s Tate Modern, where more than 150 artworks have been brought together to show how artists utilized machine technology in the pre-digital age between the 1950s and the arrival of the internet in the late 1980s.

Dreamachine is on show here, along with Alberto Biasi’s 1962 piece, Light Prisms, a cubic tray of rotating shapes that manifest bewitching spectral colors as they turn, like a kinetic preemptive take on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) also plays with electrical illumination. A founder member of Zero, the experimental German art collective that embraced new technology after World War II, his Light Room is—literally—a darkened room bejeweled with constellation-like pinpoints. Imagine gazing into a neatly organized night sky. The exhibition’s earliest pieces are Tanaka Atsuko’s paintings inspired by her Electric Dress, an assemblage of neon tube lights and light bulbs from 1956.

From the Seventies, Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Environnement Chromointerférent is an iteration of the Venezuelan artist’s spaces devoted to optical art, the process of using color and geometry to create artworks that look like they’re in motion. Meandering between the suspended spheres and blocks in his room is pleasingly psycho-dramatic as projected colored stripes appear to tilt and shift. The AARON in Harold Cohen’s AARON #1 Drawing from 1979 is a computer program of Cohen’s own invention and an early attempt at creating art using artificial intelligence. AARON suggested lines, forms and squiggles that Cohen then used to create paintings.

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The arrival of commercial computers and video games in the 1980s provided artists with more zones of exploration. In 1985, Eduardo Kac used a Minitel terminal (an early precursor of internet communication) to send a message to his girlfriend. His boxy coded web pages spell out the word tesão, a Portuguese slang word for horny. In the mid-eighties, Samia Halaby got hold of a Commodore Amiga 1000 PC in a fire sale and began tinkering with its ability to throw up lines and swirls for experiments in burgeoning digital art. Her Spooling Up 4 and Fold 2 images are here, both fizzy celebrations of pixelation. Sonia Landy Sheridan already had form in pushing new technology in creative directions, and her work from the decade included using photocopiers to take selfies. Overlaid with software-generated marks, the results could easily come from one of those cable TV programs about ghost hunting.

Suzanne Treister grabbed video gaming by the lapels, and there are still photos from her Fictional Videogame series. Treister was using the Deluxe Paint II graphic software to stretch the limits of fantasy imaging in gaming as the Nineties approached. Liliane Lijn’s The Bride from 1988 glowers in the shadows. Lijn built a number of installations based on the myth of Inanna, the ancient Sumerian goddess who traveled to the underworld and returned to the Earth’s surface, triumphant and unscathed. Lijn’s Inanna pulsates in a caged temenos, the consecrated space in front of early temples where all worshippers could feel safe. While Treister’s pieces are as Eighties as Alexis Colby’s shoulder pads, The Bride feels timeless.

Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss call their Liquid Views project a digital well, the kind of watery mirror used by Narcissus. The Narcissus in the piece’s equation is the media and how we use it to reflect on reality. It’s a touchscreen device from 1992, and visitors can poke and prod the surface to create pooling, globular images of themselves. Tatsuo Miyajima has a room of his own for Lattice B, an eight-meter-long installation of LED lights (from 1991), and Opposite Circle (1990). Both are experiments in Miyajima’s mind-boggling mathematical theories he invented to meditate on Buddhist cyclic notions of reincarnation, and their old-school calculator-like numbers flash in unending groups and configurations.

One key success of “Electric Dreams” is how it reinforces how technological advances have always been a source of interest to artists, from Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments with flying machines and Canaletto’s purported use of the camera obscura to the contemporary creatives currently trying to work out the benefits of artificial intelligence. Plus, nostalgia is big business these days, with the wonder of retro video games and toys, the revival of the vinyl record and the recasting of past fashions hailed as ironic and iconic. “Electric Dreams” plugs into a summation of these curiosities, satisfying our indefatigable wish to look back at what might seem like simpler times along the way.

“Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” is at Tate Modern in London until June 1, 2025. Advanced booking is advised.

“What have we here?” is the fruit of two years of Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s research at the British Museum in London, the U.K.’s venerable archive of historically important artifacts. Working with the institution’s cooperation, Locke has taken the opportunity to reframe a selection of the U.K.’s most discomfort-making treasures, either from the museum or on loan from other British historical establishments.

Part Locke solo exhibit, part curated museum showcase, “What have we here?” melds warehouse-style, chipboard shelving and standard formal glass vitrines for a darkly lit take on the horrors of colonialism built around a public archive with a reputation for holding on to valuables taken during Britain’s empire-building and enslavement period. The social media joke that’s been going around for a while now rings true here—when a significant or high-ticket object goes missing in the U.K., someone will inevitably post, “Has anyone tried looking for it in the British Museum?” Locke uses a welcome video at the exhibition’s entrance to plug into this awkwardness. He explains the project’s results are intended to start discussions around the inconvenient truths behind the British Museum’s collection strategy—what he calls issues of empire and messy history.

For hundreds of years, the U.K.’s governments, royalty, landed gentry and businesses enabled and profited from colonialism and slavery. All manner of precious objects were stolen from the countries they invaded and controlled along the way and—as the social media gag indicates—some of them are still housed in the British Museum. Take the Benin Bronzes, marketed by the place as one of its key attractions. Now part of Nigeria, Benin City was a mighty empire until the British invaded in 1897. The occupiers massacred Benin citizens, deposed their ruler and seized treasures—including the Bronzes—to send back to the U.K. The Bronzes include wood and ivory pieces as well as metal artworks, and Locke has homed in on the iconic ivory mask of Queen Mother Idia here. His plain plaster casts of the piece emphasize how, although the mask has become a symbol of African culture, it is kept thousands of miles from home despite the Nigerian government continually asking for the return of all Benin Bronzes. He’s also used images of the mask on the sails of Armada Boat 6.  Votive boats were used in European churches to offer prayerful protection for sailors at sea, and Locke’s reproduction vessels underscore the bitter irony of praying for the deliverance of slavers when so many slaves perished at sea and on land.

Locke has taken control of an antique porcelain bust of Queen Victoria in a vitrine opposite, retitling it Souvenir 20 (Queen Victoria) and adorning the head with a stunning headdress he’s made from false exotic regalia—plastic snakes, sequins and fake foliage. Throughout the exhibit, the museum’s explanatory text cards (name of object, country of origin, year, etc.) sit beside cards bearing Locke’s thoughts and quotes. His card beside the bust points out that, as head of the British Empire, the atrocities documented in the exhibition took place under Queen Victoria’s watch. “She’s not innocent,” he writes.

There are also share certificates on display. The certificates were issued by 18th- and 19th-century colonizing governments to raise money for their war chests. Locke has used acrylics to paint over the papers, his ghostly figures representing how he sees the certificates as instruments of control and representations of financial and colonial power.

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Other museum artifacts are presented untouched and unaltered as Locke allows their gruesome stories to speak for themselves. There’s a silver-gilt dish set with the gold pendant British armed forces took from Asantehene Kofi Karikari, king of the Ashanti Empire (now Ghana), as an indemnity payment imposed by the UK government at the end of the 1874 Anglo-Asante War. Locke’s text notes how objects can go “from being venerated to a heap of this, a heap of that, broken up between soldiers and officers. Raw loot.”

The Brooks Jug is pro-slavery propaganda, a piece of tableware given to the captain of an 18th-century slave ship to wish him success in his awful trade. The Barbados Penny is a coin from the same century, struck for use by British plantation holders in Barbados. The head depicts an African man, undoubtedly a slave. Look closely, and you’ll see two words stamped beneath his profile: I SERVE.

What Locke calls The Watchers oversee the whole set of displays. These tacit, three-quarter-life-size figures made by the artist stand on top of cabinets and cases, looking down on the exhibition. Locke says they are his Greek chorus, and they certainly provide an uneasy presence. Their implacable gazes illuminate the exhibition’s undercurrent of a shame that should be deeply felt.

“What have we here?” fulfills Locke’s intention of starting discussions with depressing success. What might be its most magical trick, though, is what should happen after visitors leave the exhibition to wander around the rest of the British Museum. Why, they might now ask, is there a moai (Easter Island statue) in one of the rooms downstairs? And the Parthenon Sculptures (nicknamed the Elgin Marbles after Lord Elgin took them from Greece in the 1800s)—how did they end up in another? Arguments to return the moai have been ongoing since 2018. Last year, the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis reiterated calls to return the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece. Then there’s the Rosetta Stone, objects looted from Sudan’s Omdurman battlefield in 1898. And so on. Yet here they all are, still in the British Museum, amongst so many more cultural treasures taken mercilessly from other lands.

“Hew Locke: what have we here?” is at the British Museum in London through February 9, 2025. Entrance is £16, and prior booking is advised.