Coventry University and the Herbert and Mead galleries
2 October 2026 – 10 January 2027, then touring

by MARK HUDSON

Close observers of contemporary art will feel a disconcerting sense of deja vu on entering Moments of Being, the first display at the Hayward Gallery Touring’s British Art Show 10 at Coventry’s Mead Gallery. The focus is on painting, with prominence given to artists who broke through in the Hayward Gallery’s 2021 Mixing It Up: Painting Today – a show credited with creating a surge in narrative painting in the aftermath of Covid. While the work of Louise Giovanelli, Mohammed Sami, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and other Mixing It Up “graduates” still looks strong, it already feels like the product of a different era. The visibility of Emma Talbot’s neo-psychedelic painted silk banners – the first thing we see on entering – takes us straight to another defining exhibition of recent times: The Milk of Dreams, the official exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which proposed a digital-mystical-posthumanist direction for art (it became, in fact, just one of many strands in today’s polymorphous scene). 

Having reviewed two previous British Arts Shows (7 and 8), both of which felt bracingly future-driven, I was disappointed to find the feel here so retrospective. But reading into the background of this five-yearly touring “snapshot of British contemporary art”, it is clear that its organisers have been divided on its temporal focus since its inception in 1979. Should it be providing the British provinces with a taste of tomorrow’s art right now, or a digest of all the era-defining exhibitions they didn’t get to see? 

While this “landmark” edition, curated by Ekow Eshun, sets out to ask, “what form empathy and shared imagination might take in polarising times” (Eshun’s words), it also has the objective of providing “a vital overview of the most exciting art produced in the UK over the past five years” (the official blurb). In other words, an opportunity to find out what art can contribute to the age of Trump, Gaza and AI, feels hindered at times by an obligation to look backwards. 

While British Art Shows regularly pull large numbers of viewers who are first time visitors to the gallery in question, and are in many cases, it’s said, first time consumers of contemporary art, how much are they – or any viewers – expected to read the wall panels, never mind the catalogue, in which BAS curators expound the complex rationales of their shows? 

This show’s title, A Chorus of Strangers, knowingly invokes Keir Starmer’s notorious “island of strangers” comment. But its point of departure, as defined in Eshun’s catalogue essay, is an early 16th-century London riot against “strangers”, in which thousands sacked the shops and homes of French and Flemish artisans; an event roundly condemned by “metropolitan intellectuals” including Thomas More and William Shakespeare. So, what changes? Paraphrasing More, as paraphrased by Shakespeare, Eshun concludes that the reaction to the presence of the “stranger”, the “outsider”, the “other” should be “not hostility, but empathy”. He has thus assembled a “chorus” of artists “exploring, challenging and reimagining ideas of connection and belonging”. The fact that at least half of these artists have names that many in Britain would still find “other” is barely mentioned by Eshun; the curator likely figuring that a preponderance of non-white artists wouldn’t surprise anyone at this stage in the cultural game.

Fascinating as all this is on paper, and I only had the opportunity to take in the catalogue with its attendant literary texts, after I’d seen the exhibition, I felt I could have been reviewing book and show as entirely independent works.  

While the second and third parts of the exhibition, States of Nature, focused on video and technologically driven art at Coventry University, and Ways of Living, comprising historically focused, immersive installations at the Herbert Art Gallery, feel less retro-flective than the first, there isn’t much, at first sight, that will feel radically challenging or wincingly innovative to even the least art-attuned of visitors. 

Jasleen Kaur’s Meccano-like architectural intervention in the University’s Delia Derbyshire Building might have had viewers gaping 20 years ago, but most will barely notice it now. Hannah Perry’s Antagonist, a pair of gigantic “dancing” steel and resin pelvic bones – just the kind of wacky modern work newspaper editors love to hear about – were too slow-moving to even start to hold attention. 

Repurposing archives has been a commonplace strategy in recent art, but Liz Johnson Artur’s free play with her own Black Balloon Archive of the British African Diaspora comes close to providing the new forms of subjectivity implicit in Eshun’s call for artists and audience to probe “human connection and the figure of the other”. Who is the “other” in her textile work juxtaposing barbershop images of young Black men with African-themed hairstyles with pieces of classical African sculpture that can be considered portraits?

There is a surprisingly similar sense of interpenetrating otherness in Alex Margo Arden’s Accounts, a cluster of nine mannequins illustrating British types, which were discarded by the National Motoring Museum, held together with a tug-of-war rope. While these life-size representations of the milkman, the butcher, the wealthy motorist etc will have been abandoned because they were in poor condition and a touch old-fashioned, it feels as if they could have been purged in a kind of “decolonising” of the museum, but from a white British, class-based perspective. 

Shiraz Bayjoo’s striking installation Land of Plenty/Plains a Plenty (2026), exploring the “intertwined histories of colonialism, migration and trade across the Indian ocean”, looks at first like just a very good example of the kind of research-based reconfiguring of materials and objects that has become a familiar staple of this kind of exhibition. Clusters of spike-like pit-props sprout from pools of volcanic dust, beneath festooning drapes of black Indian cloth embroidered in copper wire with scenes of Welsh rioters and Mauritian Sega dancers. What makes it stand out from a myriad other such works is that Bayjoo seems as angry at the poisoning of the rivers north of Swansea (where the work was commissioned) and the brutal exploitation of British workers in the processes of monetising the empire as he is at the plundering of materials from his native Mauritius. There is a fascinating expansion here of the process of identification. 

Alvaro Barrington’s wall-filling installation of social media posts punctuated by steel storefront shutters is the only work to even glance at the online barrage through which most of us are experiencing our divided and polarising times. But quirkier, more affecting and more technically innovative is Precious Okoyomon’s Sky Song, in which the British-born Nigerian-American artist, best known for their garden installations, pilots a light aircraft over the flat landscape of their adoptive Ohio, while declaiming from their own poetry on material and spiritual freedom. 

Beyond the hilarious chutzpah of the idea itself, the work opens up genuinely new possibilities in embodying the sublime (imagine if Turner had had his own plane). Alongside Ufuoma Essi’s film Bodies in Dissent, which is composed mostly of archive footage and found text, but is nonetheless strongly autobiographical in feel, it suggests that the possibilities for Eshun’s yearned-for “empathy and shared imagination” are at their most fertile when the perceptions of the artist are at their most personal and intense. If that’s hardly a revelation in itself, after a period of what feels like decades of mega-exhibitions that have barely touched on self-expression or subjective experience, it feels almost radical. That was my main take-away from a nicely put-together exhibition which addresses turbulent times, but ends up feeling rather studious and subdued at its core. 

• British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers is at Coventry University, and the Herbert and Mead galleries until 10 January. Then touring to Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield and Newcastle Gateshead until 18 June 2028.

MASI Lugano
6 September 2026 – 10 January 2027

by SABINE CASPARIE

MASI Lugano’s director, Letizia Ragaglia, has been at the helm only since the spring and, she tells the large press group, she couldn’t be more pleased to inherit the exhibition Kaari Upson: Dollhouse from her predecessor. After all, Upson is one of the most prominent and exciting feminist artists of the 21st century. This is the last leg of the exhibition, which journeyed from Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art to Kunsthalle Mannheim, before ending here. It is a beautiful temporary resting place for an exhibition, opposite the luminous deep-blue water of Lake Lugano. Upson died from cancer at 51, and today her studio manager, Michael Benevento, is present. He has decided to keep quiet, Ragaglia informs us, to let the artist and her work speak. I can’t help but think that this is possibly the most feminist gesture of all.

We are greeted by Recollection Hysteria (2012), a flesh-coloured silicone installation, covering the wall and extending into the first gallery like a stage set, with draped, curtain-like hangings and a silicone scroll suspended over it like the interior of a Moroccan tent. Nipple-like forms protrude from the fabric at regular intervals. The installation has a visceral, bodily effect; an intriguing mix of disgust and seduction. The installation is like a mix of the insides of a body, a sex den and a war zone. A smaller latex work hangs at the side and looks like the labia of a vulva. There are elements of Eva Hesse’s latex sculptures and Louise Bourgeois’s love for the abject – two artists whom Upson greatly admired – but it is as if Upson takes their ideas as a starting point from which to go bolder and naughtier. 

In her short life, Upson left an incredible breadth of works, which are primarily concerned with ideas around domestic space, not only as a built structure, but also as the most intimate part of a human life. A space where sex, jokes, rituals and intimacies take place, and sometimes trauma, moulding our psyches in the way that Upson moulds her silicone. The domestic theme takes its most obvious form in There Is No Such Thing As Outside (2017-19). First shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which was titled May You Live in Interesting Times, a giant wooden house seems to float in the central gallery, presented like a doll’s house, with its facade taken away so that the interior can be rearranged. Unlike a regular doll’s house, though, Upson’s version is human-sized; so large, in fact, that its roof breaks through the ceiling of the gallery. Inside it, an upturned chair and a candle lie ominously on the floor. This doll’s house suggests danger and violence.

Upson’s film House Worry (2019) is playing on a screen inside the stone fireplace. It shows the artist and her childhood friend in a mini version of her doll’s house, like a never-ending house of mirrors. Two grown, masked women sitting on each other’s laps in a rocking chair, and later cavorting over the floor, sends shivers down my spine, even before I find out that the women are each wearing a mask cast from the other’s face. Underneath the giant doll’s house, objects and body parts lie assembled like the remnants of a crime scene waiting to be examined by a forensic team. A giant set of teeth, a pack of kitchen paper, a stone urn, a batch of giant pills. Upson seems confident that her audience’s imagination will finish her horror story for her.

Upson discovered the sweet spot between fact and fiction, and between memory and imagination, while still a student at CalArts. In 2005, she began The Larry Project, after walking into a large abandoned and foreclosed house near her parents’ home one day in 2003. She found letters and legal documents, as well as mattresses in every room, and this set off an obsession with a fictional male character that would last all her life. Most critics agree that Larry is an amalgamation of Playboy owner Hugh Hefner and Hustler owner Larry Flynt, although Upson leaves the precise sources open. In As Long As It Takes – Part I: The Head (2007), Upson is dressed as a nurse, with a gingham face mask and blue gloves. She is crouched over a man-like form made of scraps of white fabric. Are they about to have sex or is she going to murder him? It’s not clear. In a 2016 interview, she recounted how most of the archetypal female characters in her work derive from a film class she took at CalArts, led by Bérénice Reynaud and centred on female protagonists who kill. Caretaker, castrater, mother, wife and whore.

In Untitled (2007), a female bends over the head of a man that she holds in her blue-gloved hands, who we presume to be Larry. But where the film suggested violence, the woman’s painted body suggests pity. It made me think of mother figures and Madonnas: strong female figures carrying the life of men, caring for them and grieving for them when they die.

Similarly moving is a series of mattresses with titles including King, Crib and Death Bed. Cast in silicone, then treated with pigment, they mimic the dents and remnants of fluids in the real-life, discarded ones that Kaari Upson picked off the street. These “abstract portraits” keep some of the sensuality and unease of Upson’s other works, but instead of grotesque, they veer on the poetic.

Among all the greatness, it is easy to forgive a few lesser works. I did not care much for the diptych Untitled (Kiss) (2008), in which Upson combined features of her mother’s face with those from a photograph of Angelina Jolie. The series of painted busts named after her grandmother was unoriginal. These works looked more like something you would pick up from a wacky artist in a car boot sale. Upson’s work is at is strongest when she is either in it herself, or when it is entirely abstract.

The late works explore illness and the vulnerability of the human body. Mother’s Legs (2018-19), a forest-like installation of tree trunks formed over casts of the artist’s knees, combines eeriness with comfort: the artist’s childhood memories of feeling safe at her mother’s knee height. It is hauntingly beautiful, with its stark forms and its soft pastel hues. Untitled (Foot Face) (2020-21) contains 133 drawings in saturated colours, each combining a foot and a face. Upson made them as a daily ritual when she and her mother were both affected by cancer; her mother died midway through the series. The faces get more anguished as the year progresses, but also more abstract, so that sometimes only a set of glistening teeth and preening eyes remain. Here is Upson, staring death in the face, mischievous and fearless until the end.

reviewed by BETH WILLIAMSON

The first review I wrote for Studio International, in 2019, covered an exhibition of work at Tate Britain by the British photojournalist Don McCullin (b1935). His work had first been published in 1959 in the Observer newspaper, so that exhibition marked 60 years of his career and covered the full range of his photographic practice, from that first publication, The Guvnors in Their Sunday Suits (1958). Later, there were images of acute poverty in towns in the north of England. There were scenes of homelessness in the East End of London. There were achingly pitiful pictures of those dying in the Aids pandemic in Africa. There were late Somerset landscapes too. But McCullin is best known now, and then, for his photographs of conflict across the world – Bangladesh, Beirut, Biafra, Iraq, Northern Ireland and Vietnam.

This new book marks his long commitment to documenting conflict in Vietnam, a place he visited first in 1955 for the Illustrated London News and many times after, including for the German magazine Quick and the Sunday Times. Now aged 91, McCullin has said this will be his last book, so it is a landmark publication by any measure. It is essentially a retrospective of his work in Vietnam and includes images from three campaigns in the region. Those familiar with McCullin’s work will recognise some of the images. The iconic Shell-Shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue (1968), was widely published in newspapers of the time while other images, such as The Battle for the City of Hue, South Vietnam, US Marine Inside Civilian House (1968), even featured in photography and art history classes in universities. That said, almost half the images in the book have not previously been published or exhibited but have been retrieved from McCullin’s archive.

Alongside the photographs, extracts from a conversation between McCullin and the director of Gost Books, Stuart Smith, act as captions of sorts, breathing another dimension of feeling into them in a particularly thoughtful manner. As McCullin has said elsewhere: “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” This aligns well with other statements where he foregrounds his role in Vietnam not as a photographer, but as a human being. Ultimately, he operates from a space of compassion and that is evident in each image.

This collection of images is bookended by a photograph of McCullin’s boot at the beginning and a photograph of his compass and helmet at the end. He explains how he had to acquire suitable clothing: “I scavenged my uniform from [a] first aid area where casualties were taken … There were mountains for helmets and flak jackets.” Working alongside the US marines, McCullin may have dressed like them, but he did not think like them. Original contact sheets from The Battle of Hue (1968), reproduced at the beginning of the book, give some small sense of how quickly situations develop, as well as an indication of how McCullin selected one image from many.

What is striking throughout these pages is McCullin’s continued desire not to glorify or glamorise war while, at the same time, knowing that these things were in some way inevitable. Still, his focus was not only on “heroic” US marines. There are newly conscripted recruits to the South Vietnamese army. There is the impact on local people and villages. We see suspected Vietcong recruits being dragged from hiding places and US marines walking past the bodies of Vietnamese civilians.

One photograph shows US soldiers looking for souvenirs or trophies on the body of a North Vietnamese boy, behaviour McCullin found macabre. They dumped his personal items – a medical kit, photographs and letters. These items, McCullin felt, had a story to tell. This was an ethical stance on his part, exercised further a few years later when he stopped South Vietnamese soldiers destroying the possessions of a North Vietnamese soldier. This kind of humanity is seen again in a photograph of US soldiers carrying a young North Vietnamese soldier out of a foxhole and away from battle. In the midst of war, a priest prays over a soldier while a father tries to comfort his family after an explosion. McCullin’s final trip to Vietnam was in 1972.

There are some truly horrific images in this book: a Vietnamese baby being treated after being hit by napalm; a dead North Vietnamese soldier with his face blown off. Suffering suffuses every photograph and when McCullin talks about his experience he always reveals a sensitivity that sits alongside his eye for truthful reporting. He may have wanted to take an impactful photograph, but above all he wanted to convey the horrors of war, the eternal suffering and the pointlessness and seeming endlessness of wars across the world. As he explains: “I’d witnessed combat up close. I reviled violence, always, but journalism had also inculcated me with a certain dutiful attraction to conflict.”

McCullin still lives every day with the horror of what he saw and experienced in Vietnam and elsewhere. As a photojournalist, he acted as witness for the world. As a human being, he tried to act with compassion and sensitivity. Look on this book and be reminded of humankind’s violence against itself, its inhumanity, its perpetual suffering. The role of the war photographer is now much more constrained than it was. McCullin had a free hand, and these images may be some the last truly honest images of war we will ever see.

• Vietnam by Don McCullin, is published by Gost Books, 2026, price £80/ €95.

by JOE LLOYD 

In Camden Art Centre’s wide-windowed Artists’ Studio, an elegant, upturned hand gropes towards the light. It rests above a curved, then flat base in shining bronze and the knotted branch of a tree, which segments into finger-like twigs. The bottom of this branch in turn balances on a replica of an owl’s foot covered in a tree pattern, from which protrude formidable talons. The whole assemblage suggests danger and desire, and a sprouting fecundity in the presence of death.

Titled A Hard Line to Bend (2026), this sculpture is an anomaly in the Camden Art Centre’s survey of American sculptor Liz Larner (b1960), despite giving the exhibition its title. The majority of the 36 exhibited works centre around ceramics, often so heavily treated that they come to resemble other materials. Some look like lichen-slicked stones; others evoke the clay from which they were fired. The exhibition is an inventory of colour and texture. Larner’s work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe, as well as at Galerie Max Hetzler in London and the Modern Institute in Glasgow. But A Hard Line to Bend is her first institutional survey in the UK.

Larner trained at CalArts in the 1980s under John Baldessari, where she specialised in photography. “Right before I graduated, I thought I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to take pictures of things. I want to make them,” she says. Larner started making things with some extraordinary materials. Damage Control (1987) is a block of dangerous substances enlacing TNT, saltpetre and ammonium nitrate; curators at the Hirshhorn Museum wanted to borrow it for its 2013 exhibition Damage Control, but it proved impossible to convince shippers to send it over. Larner says: “I’ve always felt that material has a great message, and so I work with a lot of different materials, and I always feel that it comes through in a psychic and physical way. I’m not saying it affects everybody the same way, but I just think it’s so powerful.”

Some of her materials seem an unlikely source for sculpture. One set of 2021 works gathers discarded single-use plastics – water bottles, coffee-cup lids, bin bags, food containers, electronic goods packaging – into teeming wall-mounted assemblages. Inspired by the discovery that much American recycling was sent to China until that country refused it, Larner gathered waste from friends, family and gallery staff. She acquired huge quantities and, after thoroughly scrubbing the material, began to tie it together by colour, recycling it into new forms. “I realised that these things are so beautifully designed,” she says. “But they’re also kind of invisible. It still blows my mind – I don’t know if it’s because the design is perfect, or because of our dread over the intense need we have for these disposable things.”

From early on, Larner also made works that enacted a process and interacted with the spaces in which they were displayed. Every Artist Gave a Breath (1988) required other artists to breathe on to an agar-filled petri dish; the resulting bacteria were then left to grow. The motorised sculpture Corner Basher (1988) hurls a metal ball and chain into the wall, leaving its mark. Beholders are allowed to choose the speed setting. Her 1980s oeuvre was not always so hazardous: Come Together (1989), reconfigured for the Camden show, sees a panoply of threads and strings – here ribbon, rope, measuring tapes, wires, lace, TV antennae and human hair – explode across the room from a central point. The floor, walls and ceiling become a necessary condition for the artwork’s existence.

In the mid-90s Larner started to make ceramics a major plank of her practice. “I was never really educated in ceramics, though I took some classes,” she recounts. “It was not something I had technical prowess in – it was really this process of being led into it because of other ideas that I had.” Her first move towards the medium, on display at Camden, were Smiles (1996-2011), crinkly white porcelain sculptures based on depictions of facial expressions from literature. She says: “I had read this book [The Red, White, and Blue] by John Gregory Dunne, which made me think about how much the word ‘smile’ needs a modifier in front of it.” The process of their creation was tricky. “We had to cast them in three different parts and put them together. They were so insanely fragile. When you first put them in the kiln it’s just dust basically. I had so much lost just getting from the table to the kiln. And then when I fired them, because it was cone 10 porcelain, they would all deform.”

Now possessing a kiln, Larner quickly progressed towards other types of ceramic. “I was really interested in colour and form, and this was a great way to do it,” she says. Ceramic sculptures comprise the lion’s share of the work at Camden. Many are plate-like panels that protrude some distance from the wall, either by ceramic extensions of themselves or by polished metal plate backs. Larner explains: “I wanted them to not be like paintings on the wall, and I wanted them to have some space.” They range immensely in appearance and texture. Some evoke organic forms like flowers; some crumble and crack like dried-up earth. Marthe (2019), inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his wife, has watery post-impressionist colours created from epoxy resin. i (calefaction) (2014-15) and Distomunge (2017) have stones and minerals embedded in their surface, creating an effect both terrestrial and cosmic.

They suggest an artist willing to experiment, rather than settle into an easy stream. Still and All (2022) is presented shattered into five separate pieces, three on the wall and two on the floor. Intended to be a single wall piece, it fell apart during firing. “It would be really hard for me to smash something because it was not what I intended,” says Larner, “but I really like that part of being an artist: something happens and it opens up a new avenue of thinking and making. At the time, though, I was sad that it had broken!” When Larner laid the pieces out in front of the kiln, however, she “realised [she] loved how it sat. I was thinking about how it encounters the plane that it is resting on, which is super physical. I’m very interested in humans being aware of our physicality, how we share space with other things.”

Another set of ceramics are orbs scattered around the gallery floor, which remind me of Lucio Fontana’s Natura series. Some have a metallic sheen, while others are matte and pockmarked like deep-sea rocks. They are modelled on asteroids photographed by Nasa. “I was blown away by the idea that the first asteroid was discovered by a Franciscan monk. He named the first asteroid Ceres after the Roman goddess,” says Larner. As more were discovered, their names went from those of deities to those of humans. Larner continues: “And then it got really weird: there was an asteroid named Beer. I like the idea of all these different earthly associations being projected up into space.”

The eponymous work A Hard Line to Bend also emerged from a fusion of matter and mythology. “I started that piece about two and a half years ago,” recalls Larner. “I found a branch that had fallen off a madrone tree, so I just brought it inside the studio to die.” Larner placed it in her covered yard, where she passed it every day, wondering what could be done with it. Sometime before, she had read a book by the Jungian psychoanalyst Barbara Black Koltuv about Lilith, a much-debated figure from Hebrew mythology. The sculpture was originally going to be called Lilith and the Morphic Field, a reference to the idea popularised by the parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake which posits that nature holds a memory.

In Larner’s telling, the first human in the Garden of Eden requested to be split in two after being envious of animal procreation, leading to the creation of Lilith and Adam as the first woman and man. “So, there were two. But in terms of relationships there was a dominance question – Lilith did not want to be dominated – and Yahweh was upset that there was not an easy relationship, that there was refusal on one part of the duo. And so Yahweh said: ‘If you don’t do what Adam wants, I’m going to exile you and a third of your children will die.’ And so Lilith said ‘OK’ and laughed.” Other stories made Lilith the assistant of the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna who lived within a tree and the “screech owl”, a mother of monsters, demonised for causing infant mortality and inspiring adultery. “She’s the original Batgirl” – Larner laughs – “part-human and part-animal. And she’s a woman who refused to be dominated and chose her own path.” It seems a good analogy for Larner’s own practice.

• Liz Larner: A Hard Line to Bend is at Camden Art Centre, London, until 17 January 2027.

Turner Contemporary, Margate

3 October 2026 – 24 January 2027

by ANNA McNAY

Words, words, words. Words are my tool. But what happens when an artist’s use of words is so prolific, yet so efficient and precise, that mine suddenly seem superfluous? This is exactly how I feel in relation to the work of Sophie Calle (b1953, Paris). Each piece consists of a bipartite sign, which, unlike the linguistic and semiotic model of Ferdinand de Saussure, with its signifier (arbitrary words or image) and signified (mental concept), comprises two signifiers: word (typically a first-person account) and image (photograph or moving image). In an interview with the author Édouard Louis in the catalogue to accompany her exhibition, Something Missing?, which began at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in March 2026, Calle suggests it is due to her parents that she is who she is, and that her mother influenced her to want to write, and her father to want to photograph. However, since she felt inadequate at each of these professions in and of themselves, she brought them together and became an artist, something at which she has excelled over the past half a century.

Calle’s projects range from the banal to the profound, yet each is presented with warmth, humour and conceptual rigour. The theme of absence runs through pretty much all her work, so much so that the gallery’s introduction goes as far as to call absence “more than just a theme, [it] is Calle’s method”. Indeed, the all-important question mark in the exhibition title, Something Missing?, asks the question as to whether anything actually is missing, or whether Calle’s method conversely draws out a presence inherent in each absence. 

For example, when she was invited to do an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, in dialogue with the artist, to mark 50 years since his death (already an absence of sorts), Calle initially turned down the opportunity because she was afraid to have her works shown alongside his. Then, during the pandemic, Picasso’s works were all covered over with protective sheets, and Calle decided to make a work about his “ghost-like” (and therefore far less intimidating) works, called Picassos in Lockdown (2022). In it, the covered work is shown hanging alongside its label. It is a bit like the conundrum of whether or not a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no one hears it: does something remain present when it is labelled as such and simply concealed, or must it be visible?

Similarly, What Do You See? (2013) responds to the thefts of a number of works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. The frames were left behind during the thefts, and they were restored by the museum and rehung, empty. “All the missing paintings were visible in their absence,” says Calle (perhaps also answering the Picasso conundrum). For this work, she asked curators, guards and other staff members to describe what they saw within the (empty) frames. Similarly, Turners (1998-2013), an especially suitable project for Turner Contemporary, looks at the theft of two JMW Turner works from the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt while on loan from Tate in 1994.

Standing in front of the replacement Turners, Calle this time asked curators, guards and other staff members to describe the missing works. This is shown alongside Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (c1840), proving that Calle is not too intimidated to show alongside the British master: “I wasn’t afraid of Turner like I was of Picasso,” she says. “There’s more distance.”

Extending the idea of covered or absent works, Because (2018-26) displays images concealed behind curtains, on which are embroidered texts revealing the motivation behind each photograph. Since, for Calle, an image alone typically feels unfinished, she interrogated her reasons for taking that shot. Was it of something beautiful? Did it capture a particular memory? The idea was to slow down the viewer’s access to the seemingly banal images and make them stop and think more about them. 

Absence is also lingering in the oldest work on display, The Blind (1986). For this poignant project, Calle met people who were born blind and had never seen and asked them what their image of beauty was. The result is a real tear-jerker, and itself a thing of beauty. The answer here would definitively seem to be that even where we might see or expect an absence, there is nevertheless a presence. 

Voir la Mer (2011) also made me suppress a sob or two. This time, Calle took people living in the mountains near Istanbul to see the sea for the first time. They were blindfolded and filmed from behind as they were allowed to look and, minutes later, they turned round and looked into the camera, their eyes filled with emotion. Calle was too scared to miss that “decisive moment” – “I could not ask them to look at the sea for the first time 10 times!” she jokes – and so she asked a friend to do the filming for her. For once, Calle says, the images spoke for themselves, without words: “It’s my only silent work.” 

A truly monumental work in the exhibition is Calle’s Catalogue Raisonée of the Unfinished (2023). It comprises an inventory of every project she had ever wanted to do, but for some reason didn’t finish. For each one, there is a description of the idea, rubber-stamped with her reason for not completing it (think anything and everything from “what’s the point?” to “too late” to “self-censorship”), and an image (or, in a couple of cases, film) relating to the idea. Calle describes this work as “a way of giving life to my projects that I didn’t finish … a way of unburdening the weight”.

The pièce de résistance, however, has to be On the Hunt (2017-24). Once again, Calle was commissioned to make an exhibition for a museum that initially confounded her. The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature) in Paris invited her, but she felt she had no connection to hunting – until, of course, she did. Calle’s unique take on the problem was to interrogate the idea of hunting for a partner. She looked at personal ads from the journal Le Chasseur Français (The French Hunter), between 1895 and 2010, and then also on Tinder up to 2019. Assuming the role of a sociologist or historian, Calle sorted the ads by gender and divided them into 12 pairs of male-seeking-female and female-seeking-male, accompanied by images of wildlife captured by a night camera. For each pair, across each time period (mostly a decade, marked by a gold label at the bottom of each wooden frame), she wrote a headline and highlighted the prevalent search criteria. Here, the absence is the target of each search, who is very much implied by each concise description. Sometimes shocking, sometimes poignant, I didn’t see anybody looking at this project who did not break into a smile – if not a giggle – at some point. 

Above all, Calle is a storyteller. Her works range from tearjerking to laugh-out-loud and everything in between. Their banality captures something that speaks to us all about the everydayness of the everyday. The absences create openings into which we, as viewers, can step, becoming implicated and a part of the work. Is it perhaps we who are signified?

National Gallery, London
3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027

by JOE LLOYD

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) has an image problem – or does he? The French artist was contentious in his lifetime. Édouard Manet pleaded with anyone who saw him to “tell him please to give up painting”; contemporary critic Albert Wolff described one nude as “a mass of decomposing flesh with green and purple spots that indicate the state of total putrefaction in a corpse”. In more recent times his antisemitic views have come under fire, while the pictures of nude bathers that dominated his last decades have led to accusations of misogyny. But the biggest charge is that he was a painter of chintzy, saccharine, sloppy baubles. It has become a cliche to call his work “chocolate box”. In 2015, a group of protesters went viral after picketing New York’s Met and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts with placards declaring: “Renoir sucks at painting.” They wanted nothing less than to strip Renoir’s work from the walls.

The reason Renoir was on those walls in the first place, of course, is because so many curators and collectors did value his work. Renoir remains popular with the public: the National Gallery’s new exhibition broke advanced ticket booking records, selling more than 2024’s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. It achieved similar success this spring at the Musée d’Orsay. As well as a blockbuster draw, Renoir and Love offers a chance to reset the critical reputation of Renoir the painter, if not Renoir the man. To do so, the curators have narrowed the field to 1865-85, the artist’s most creatively fecund years, when he was one of the leading lights of impressionism. They have pulled in an impressive range of loans. And they have chosen to focus on Renoir’s least disputed talent: his propensity for capturing intimacy, whether romantic, friendly or familial.

Renoir and Love is an exhibition that abounds in small moments of connection. Couples converse in sun-kissed gardens or pore over a newspaper. A young man awkwardly approaches a young woman outside a music school. Bathers fraternise on a camembert-shaped pontoon. Sailors enjoy post-prandial cigarettes. Two women relax in each other’s company in a rowing boat. Claude Monet’s wife, Camille, lies on the grass with her seven-year-old son. Brothers and sisters sit together with gentle regard. Perhaps no artist devoted so much time to capturing these most mundane pleasures. Renoir admired the rococo paintings of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Antoine Watteau; in 1876, he followed the former in a painting of a woman on a swing, clad in a white dress, that recalls the latter’s Pierrot. But here we are not in some enchanted pastoral grove but in a suburban garden. The whimsical movement and eroticism of Fragonard’s masterpiece is replaced by a bashful awkwardness, complicated by the presence of a young girl.

It can often seem as if modernity has failed us. And so we are often drawn to those artists that suggest that the maladies of the modern city – alienation, isolation, divide, precariousness – have been there from the start. Renoir almost never reveals these issues. While Manet’s The Cafe-Concert (1879) sees three characters from different social backgrounds exist in their own spheres, Renoir’s At the Cafe (1877) has a well-heeled couple and a lower-class woman happily co-existing at the same crowded table. Yet I am not convinced that Renoir’s focus on happiness makes him any less serious a painter of reality. Summer weekend walks down city streets, drinking outside a bar on a sunny afternoon, trips to the theatre, gatherings of friends at each other’s apartments: Renoir captures the small joys of modern urban living.

They are the sort of incidents that today might be captured on a phone camera. Some of the most interesting paintings here themselves have the feeling of an accidental snapshot. La Place Clichy (1880) sees a woman viewed in profile about to cross the road – the sort of quotidian instance that happens innumerable times each day, here immortalised. Other works have a blurriness created by wet-on-wet painting, as if they have been captured on a low-spec video camera. This sense of the extempore, of catching fleeting time, might be Renoir’s great talent. His masterpiece the Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876), loaned to the UK from the Musée d’Orsay for the first time, expands this to grand scale. Few paintings capture momentary jollity so well, whether that of dancers, spectators or those sitting down for a drink. Renoir was the only major impressionist from a working-class background, and there is a generosity in the way he accords these everyday Parisians the same respect as his later bourgeois subjects.

Renoir’s best work has a true literary sensibility, one closer to Guy de Maupassant’s stories of lusty days out than Émile Zola’s social critique. Many of his paintings lead you to wonder what has happened before and what will transpire next. Will the man in the brown coat in The Umbrellas (c1881-86) offer his shelter to the woman in front of him, identified by the curators as a milliner’s assistant? What will the boating couple in Luncheon (1875) discuss as they finish their wine? Two beguiling 1883 paintings show Renoir’s future wife, Aline, dancing with a man. Her face is a picture of contentment, his of devotion. In one of them, the pair waltz across a floor littered with matches and cigarettes, the litter of a long night out.

Renoir and Love often makes it hard to see why the artist’s canvases, rather than his views, have aroused such scorn. The final work in the exhibition offers some clues. Feeling that impressionism had run its course, Renoir decided to move to a smoother style, inspired by classical French painting, in particular Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In 1887, he unveiled The Great Bathers, an enormous depiction of idealised female nudes frolicking in the water. It lacks his previous psychological intimacy and Ingres’ order and force, though it impressed Monet and inspired Paul Cézanne. Later, he would retreat to softness and sensuality, and it is this second act that has divided so many. But the genius of his first two decades is hard to argue against.

British Museum, London
10 September 2026 – 11 July 2027

by JULIET RIX

Bayeux mania has hit Britain. The first release of tickets for the British Museum’s Bayeux Tapestry display sold out the same day with a record £2.5m taken (more tickets go on sale on 21 October). We have seen nothing like this since the museum showed the treasures of Tutankhamun. The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition is, says curator Michael Lewis, “not just a once in a lifetime opportunity, but once in a millennium”. Well … yes and no. 

This rare artwork and remarkable survivor has been on public show at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Bayeux, Normandy, since 1983. It was temporarily removed from view last year for the museum to be refurbished (the event that has allowed it to travel) and will return there in October 2027. The British Museum exhibition is, though, certainly the first-in-a-millennium chance to see it in England, the country of its subject and probably of its birth.

The Tapestry (capitalised because this is part of its name rather than a description, the work is, in fact wool embroidery) was probably made by English nuns known across Europe at the time for the quality of their needlework. It is believed to have been stitched within a decade or so of the events it depicts – the lead up to and actual Norman Conquest of England (1065-1066). 

Most experts believe it was commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and half-brother of William (“The Conqueror”). The story is told from a Norman perspective, but it is, especially at the beginning, not unsophisticated propaganda and surprisingly respectful of the English side. “Harold is initially shown as a good man and a brave warrior,” says Lewis, and crucially, despite William’s claim to the English throne, Harold is described as Rex (King). In the scene in which Harold takes an oath of allegiance to William (scene 23), which Norman sources insist included accepting William as Edward’s successor and English sources describe as under duress, Lewis sees Harold as “conflicted”. The tapestry text does not help us. The body language does seem ambivalent, but the sullen-looking face is just his moustache.  

After William became king of England, he made Odo Earl of Kent and, in 1068, left Odo as regent during a return trip to Normandy. The Tapestry may well have been made in Kent – most likely in Canterbury – before being shipped across the Channel to Bayeux where Odo was building a cathedral consecrated in 1077. The Tapestry first appears in documentation in a Bayeux Cathedral inventory of 1476. And, although there have been repeated requests from the British to borrow it, the Tapestry has never since left France – until now. 

It has been a controversial loan, with thousands of people signing a French petition to try to stop it on grounds of risk to the fragile artwork. At the British Museum, relief was clearly intense when the Tapestry arrived safely and the work has been exceptionally well displayed. Shown flat for the first time (it is usually hung vertically as it was probably designed to be), the lighting is perfect. And the glass covering it is entirely free of reflections (while also no doubt being proof against anything you can imagine and more. The British government has “insured”, the Tapestry for an estimated £800m). 

The hype, though, has created a popularity problem. The visitor’s first view of the Tapestry is from a balcony above it and the British Museum is proud of this being the first time it has been possible to see the whole work at once. It is indeed impressive to view its full 68.3 metre (224ft) length, but of the artwork you see only glimpses between the heads of the viewing public. At least it is just heads, not also phones. The museum banned photography soon after opening to speed up the passage of the viewing public. 

There is nonetheless queueing at every stage and once down at Tapestry level the atmospheric soundtrack of birdsong, horses and waves is overshadowed by one constant refrain (thankfully in a calm, non-aggressive tone): “Please keep moving … Please keep moving.”

It is understandable, but frustrating. This is a beautiful and complex work, with so much to take in: the historic narrative, the characters, the borders full of extraordinary creatures, and the 11th-century design and artistry.  

The Tapestry’s 58 scenes start with its most visually vivid and identifiable character, the shaggy-bearded Edward the Confessor, King of England, whose childlessness and disputed succession kicks off the story. He sits enthroned beneath the roof of the first of the Tapestry’s more than 30 fabulous buildings, all representative but each different, with turrets and tiles and carefully embroidered brickwork. 

The first “tree” is close by, too, one of many winding sinewy organic forms that punctuate the narrative – like friendlier versions of multi-armed triffids. The horses are the most realistic element of the Tapestry. Their faces are as varied as the humans’ and they have an actual and narrative dynamism – a real sense of forward motion as they go into the attack, followed by falling and struggling at monstrous angles that vividly convey the chaos of battle. 

The Tapestry is epic poetry in visual form. There is rhythm in the colours (red, ochre, blue) and forms – horses, stripy boats or soldiers layered together. The lighting makes the picture look like a painting, the embroidered texture like light brushwork; you have to really lean in to make out the stitching. And yet, the work’s technique naturally dictates its style and patterns recur in different contexts from castle walls to the net or rings of soldiers’ mail.

Key scenes stand out, though they are not always easy to precisely identify from the sparse information above the Tapestry. The British Museum has chosen to highlight important moments in the historical story, rather than translate each Latin title within the Tapestry, let alone comment on it. This is a shame (though no doubt more information would slow the progress of the shuffling hordes). The Tapestry’s own embroidered Latin text tells you what is happening – with no historian’s guesswork or curatorial assumption – and identifies key characters such as King Edward, William (“The Conqueror”), King Harold and Odo. 

I particularly like the inscription at scene 37, in which ships are being loaded for the invasion of England. It ends “… and here they are dragging a wagon of wine and arms”. Wine that no doubt gets consumed during the barbecue feast the Normans are shown enjoying after landing at Pevensey on the south coast of England. Armies have always marched on their stomachs and here is a rich scene of the Normans cooking spit roasts and kebab-like skewers. The scene culminates in the image of a semicircular “high table” at which Bishop Odo blesses the meal.  

The Tapestry’s original text is in the catalogue and in the British Museum’s online presentation (Explore the Bayeux Tapestry online – Bayeux Museum). In each of these, the whole tapestry is presented scene by scene accompanied by the original Latin with an English translation. These are wonderful resources if you cannot make it to the exhibition and also, frankly, if you can. Taking a look in advance ensures you can identify what you want to see and avoids conversations like the one I overheard: “Is that King Harold taking his oath before William?” … “I’m not sure … I think it might be here.” 

Don’t miss Edward the Confessor’s death scenes (27 and 28), a pair of images one above the other. The text here reads: “Here King Edward, in bed, is addressing his faithful companions … And here he is dead.” At the foot of his bed in 27 is his queen, Edith (who was also Harold’s sister), dabbing her robe to her eye. She is unnamed but nobody doubts her identity (no other woman would have been shown in this position in this scene). 

In a Tapestry totalling more than 600 human figures, Edith is one of just three women in the central narrative (there are three more in the border). The other two are an unnamed woman leaving a burning building (scene 47) and Ælfgyva, her face being awkwardly touched by a priest (scene 15). The stitched text here reads: “Where a certain cleric and Ælfgyva.” It stops there, failing to tell us what they did or are doing. In the border just below, however, is a little figure of a naked man with oversized genitals, his arms posed to match those of the cleric. There are various theories … make of it what you will.

The borders of the Tapestry, above and below, are full of little motifs and fabulous creatures, some real and familiar (a donkey, birds), others mythical and fantastical. The style often resembles that of illuminated manuscripts or in some cases medieval textiles. Experts still argue about whether they are merely decorative or are symbolic comments on the main scenes. I can’t help leaning towards the latter, but their specific meaning is lost in time.  

Less so the flame-tailed Halley’s comet (scene 32) spotted just after Harold’s coronation. A gaggle of men point up at it, the one nearest us looking particularly fearful. This is regarded as an omen, a warning that Harold’s reign will not go well – and so it proves. By scene 35, we have William building ships for the crossing to England (some of the most colourful and vibrant images) and the scene is set, literally, for “1066 and all that”, the Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings. Embroidery will always be symbolic in its representations, but the battle here is visceral. In the main scenes we see the Norman horsemen clash with English foot soldiers, while in the border below lie dead, wounded and decapitated solders. Beneath scene 57 dead combatants are being stripped not only of their weapons but of their armour and clothing too. There is no pretence here that battle is anything other than nasty.   

Perhaps the Tapestry’s best-known image – King Harold being killed by an arrow in the eye – comes in the main section of scene 57. It is quite hard to spot the arrow, which turns out to be appropriate as it was apparently only added during the 19th century restoration. There is a vertical figure with a just-visible arrow pointing at his face, but the arrow is faint because the wool used here was coloured with “modern” synthetic dye rather than the far more durable organic original. Backing up the arrow’s 19th-century provenance, drawings of the tapestry from the 18th century do not show it.

The arrow story, indeed, does not appear in history until the 12th century, earlier sources describing Harold as hacked to death. And just after the Tapestry figure with the arrow is another, on the ground, shieldless, a sword-wielding horseman looming over him, an axe above his head. The text reads: “Harold Rex Interfectus Est”, “Here King Harold has been killed” – past tense. The word Harold is above the arrow man, “has been killed” above the horizontal man. So, the arrow man might be Harold (it has his moustache), facing the start of his demise (via, originally, weaponry other than an arrow) while the man on the ground (also moustachioed) also or more likely Harold, the dead or dying king. One thing is for sure; that most famous image is not original. 

This end of the work is the least well preserved and it has for centuries been missing its final scene or scenes. The Tapestry may well have ended with the coronation of William in Westminster Abbey – it would be a logical end to the story – but we will never know for sure. We do know that the tapestry has been used (and abused) as a political tool probably since its creation, and certainly in more recent times. 

Napoleon had it displayed at the Louvre ahead of his planned invasion of England as a symbol of French domination, and the Nazis (mis)appropriated it to demonstrate an Aryan race (as they saw the Normans) taking the land Hitler also wanted. The SS’s “ancestral heritage” unit was sent to study the Tapestry during the occupation of Bayeux in 1944, the work was dangerously transported to Paris. After the liberation, the Tapestry was displayed at the Louvre – with the final scene of the English fleeing the battlefield diplomatically folded out of sight.

The Tapestry still carries cultural and political power. The French President intervened to allow the “masterpiece” to travel, and it was welcomed here by the Prime Minister and King Charles III – a descendant of William. He called the “unprecedented” loan, the “best possible symbol” of the closeness of the UK and France and a reminder of “what our countries can do if we join forces”. So, regardless of the Tapestry’s previous and future display in Bayeux, this exhibition is undoubtedly important – and another chapter to add to the long and remarkable story of this unique work.

The Perimeter, London
25 September – 16 December 2026

by JOE LLOYD

Consider the lobster – not any old homard, but the one hanging from a wall in The Perimeter, a non-profit art gallery in a mews in Bloomsbury, central London. Attached to a hook, which itself balances on a larger hook stuck to the wall, it has a body largely composed of glossy blue units somewhere between a spindle and a salt cellar. These components are bound together by a gleaming metal skeleton in an elaborate arrangement. But that’s not all: this biomorphic framework is counterpoised by alien elements. There are two yellowish stars, an oversized tooth, a slice of gouda and a potato. The end of one arm is covered by what appears to be a printed ribbon but is a thin curved strip of metal. A bathroom tap, embossed twice with the warning “Hot”, extends from its front. It is a lobster and not a lobster. 

It is a new work created for Swimming by Night, Magali Reus’s first institutional exhibition in Britain since her South London Gallery showcase in 2018. There, Reus displayed sculptures that resembled variously the skeletons of transport, obsolete industrial measuring instruments and Heath Robinson machines. The gallery’s walls featured engraved numbers resembling the draft line on a ship’s hull that indicates the water depth above the keel. Swimming by Night continues this interest: the Perimeter’s central staircase features a series of numbers measuring water levels, as if the gallery is under threat from some flood of Biblical proportions. But many of the artworks here are less redolent of mechanical devices than entities from nature.

The lobster/not-lobster, Rig (Bisous Bisque) (2026), is part of Reus’s Rigs series, one of nine hanging inside the gallery. Each bears resemblance to a creature – a bat, a ray, a jellyfish, a seahorse – but equally interpolates or evokes other inanimate objects. The seahorse-esque Rig (She Saw) (2025) reimagines the long-snouted fish as a spiny, bony comb. As Reus explains: “I had already, for a while, been interested in the idea of the silhouette and how to use shape or form to mimic something that could be construed as an animal, or as living. I was trying to find ways of conjuring up ‘the idea of animal’ through using objects and materials that perhaps were not the most obvious of choices.”

Now based in London, Reus grew up on the coast of the Netherlands, and Swimming by Night has a nautical or at least aquatic bent. The Rigs series was first exhibited earlier this year at Museum Beelden aan Zee, an institution in the sand dunes of The Hague. “It’s a really beautiful museum and a unique architectural space,” says Reus. “Most of the natural light arrives far above eye-level. The walls were constructed from panelled concrete slabs, each of which had a threaded plug insert. I was very interested in the architectural motif of these threaded inserts and in using these as a means of hanging the sculptures, thereby plugging them directly into the existing architecture.”

For the Rigs, Reus drew on her childhood memory of the area, of swimming and time spent at the beach, and of a seafront thronged with souvenir shops selling keychains and earrings. “Wearing an earring,” says Reus, “is a mode of expression. In all its bodily proximity, it strongly relates to the person it is hooked on; it speaks of the way this person likes themselves to be perceived by others.” The town is also a fishing port. The idea of coalescing two types of hooks – those used to catch fish and those that people hook on their own bodies – emerged. 

Reus continues: “I like to think about the viewer’s relationship to and experience of a work. It can be something that holds your attention, captures you, or catches you off-guard for a moment. I thought of this potential metaphorically for these Rig works, and how, to me, it relates to the idea of luring fish, or possibly also the luring potential that a piece of jewellery such as an earring holds.” Despite their similarities, the Rigs differ immensely in material and tone. The bat, Rig (All Eyes On) (2025), floats above a heart displaying, in punched up letters, the phrase “Lets hang”, as if on a Love Hearts sweet. Rig (The Lab) (2025) features components based on a glow-in-the-dark skeleton. Its creation proved fateful: a few weeks after starting it, Reus broke her elbow. Each one projects a different personality. One can imagine an entire menagerie of these carefully crafted beings.

The Rigs are joined by works from three other recent and new series. Upstairs, Reus has placed a series of sculptures from her Streamers series. At first glance, these resemble fish skeletons, swaying as if in a breeze. But with their colouration – each segment’s white top gives way to darker shades beneath – and occasional glimmering resin inserts, they also resemble the carcasses of a Christmas trees. Like the Rigs, these sculptures were first shown at Museum Beelden aan Zee in January. “I tend to find January a tragic time of year,” Reus explains, “much of it due to the bad weather and it being right after the holiday season celebrations. Streets then tend to be covered in discarded Christmas trees, some already without needles, left forlorn outside, beside garbage and other unwanted domestic debris.” Reus started photographing these festive remnants, before asking others to submit their own pictures. She has now amassed an archive of more than 3,000 from across the world.

The Streamers’ fish skeleton form links them to a second tossed-away object. “A similar thing,” Reus recalls, “occurs during the summertime at the seaside: the moment of enjoying a deliciously fresh, ocean-caught fish is a celebration of sorts, but once consumed, the bones are equally swiftly discarded, thrown out on the streets or into garbage bags. These carcasses in the Streamers series attempt to conjure up this idea of both these seasonal post-celebration moments.” The Streamers thus unite the disposables across seasons, granting them a new lease of life. Reus continues: “As newly conceived shapes, I wanted them to feel reanimated and optimistic in their new guise, for them to join forces in a sort of mournful/joyful dance.

This idea of immortalising the disposable detritus of hedonistic consumption and seasonal celebration recurs throughout Swimming by Night. Merlin (Rock and Sole) (2024) fuses the basket of a deep-fat fryer with the ring-pulled lid of a fish tin. The Subs series (2026), some displayed opposite the Streamers, are structured around fabricated pizza boxes with uncannily accurate frayed edges. The interiors of these boxes are sheathed with yet another disposable item, Christmas wrapping paper, screen-printed based on Reus’s collection.

All of Reus’s sculptures are executed with meticulous attention to detail. The Subs have bespoke pizza saver tripods displaying images and patterns that match the wallpaper design. Each Streamer rises above a plinth crafted to resemble a manhole, labelled with an acronym reflecting its name, “to connect them to water, but also to the street and a larger network of sorts”. This attention to detail extends to the artworks themselves, which are all the products of myriad processes. Bisous Bisque features no less than 11 substances, all of which have been worked and processed in various ways. A steel bar has been “forged, brushed, blackened and oiled”, plywood has been “stained, sanded and wax-polished”.

Magali models her works with computer programs before actualising them by hand. Nothing is a found object; each component is the product of immense labour. Bisous Bisque’s blue colour was created by layering up six shades of blue paint and then sanding them down to reveal what Reus aptly calls the “paint archaeology”, before being polished and waxed to give it the appearance of a glazed ceramic. Its skeleton system was inspired by traditional beading. I honestly don’t know,” recalls Reus, “how I was able to get to this stage and see the piece finished as such. When you consider all the individual parts involved in its construction: every little metal connection has its own very particular shape, all of which has been hand-bent. Every single piece within the sculpture had to be conceived and constructed separately, for it all to fit and hold itself together. Looking back, I can barely remember how I was able to do it. I believe the whole process took more than half a year.”

The same precision applies to the mise en scène of the entire exhibition. Artworks are identified with metallic number plates – made by Reus – which resemble those in an anthropology museum vitrine. The room featuring the Streamers series has a deep blue floor, like a cold northern sea. The Sub series wrapping paper conjures the forms and colours of stained glass, and is placed opposite a window so that it can be viewed speckled with light. Just as Reus grants dignity to the forms of jettisoned trees, bones, boxes and paper, the arrangement at the Perimeter accords each sculpture the respect that it deserves. It is a plunge worth taking.

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
25 September 2026 – 24 January 2027

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Anyone who has spent time in Europe’s ancient cities – such as Rome, where I was lucky enough to live in my early 20s – will have had cause to stop and stare at the ancient fragments that pepper the urban landscape; sections of crumbling wall erupting in the middle of a roundabout; remnants of statues, fountains, tombs that emerge along backstreets or parks, usually unattributed; anonymous pieces of a bygone civilisation. And yet our museums are filled with often similar-looking elements, a very different value signalled by their placement on plinths and pedestals, lovingly lit and labelled. What power and significance lie in the fragment? 

It was exactly that kind of musing – while strolling through the streets of Rome with a colleague – that planted the seeds of this show in the mind of CD Dickerson, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at Washington’s National Gallery of Art (NGA). He took a deep dive into the topic, with background reading including Pliny the elder and “his encounter with the Colossus of Rhodes lying on the ground, in pieces. He expressed awe and wonder about this fragment … [which] made me think there was a story to be told,” said Dickerson, at the opening of the show.

The more Dickerson delved, the more he realised that this story resonates not just across “art history, archaeology and conservation, but philosophy and literature. The fragment had become an urgent topic in its own right … but there had not been an exhibition that put that theorising to the test and made that fragment come alive to the public.”

Pulling this show together, and making it interesting, intelligible and relevant must have been quite the journey for Dickerson and his fellow curators, Andrew Sears, assistant curator of Northern European paintings at the NGA, and Arturo Galansino, director general of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.

A major collaboration between these Florence and Washington institutions, the show features about 75 sculptures, drawn from across the globe and almost the history of human civilisation. It entailed navigating collections and negotiating with an impressive variety of lenders, including the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Athens’ National Archaeological Museum, the National Roman Museum, Florence’s National Archaeological Museum and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico. 

Themes emerged, according to the origin of the sculptures or the cause of damage – through accident, acts of vandalism, war or erosion. But, Sears said at the preview, the closer they looked into contexts, the more “the categories … started to undo themselves. What is a fragment? What is a sculpture? What is a figure or body? And most importantly … what is breakage?” Questions around the latter multiplied as they explored the aesthetic of the ruin, as deployed by Rodin – the purpose and energy of his statue shown further into the show, L’Homme qui Marche (The Walking Man) of 1899-1900,seems, if anything, to be exaggerated by the deliberate omission of a head. And for some of the contemporary artists featured – Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, El Anatsui, Huma Bhabha – fractures and absences are the point. As Sears said: “The line between breaking and creating is not as clear as one might think.”

The exhibition starts with the glowing white marble body of Margaret of Brabant, wife of Emperor Henry VII, part of a funerary monument he commissioned from Giovanni Pisano after her death in 1311. Pisano renders her hopeful, upturned face eerily human as she is lifted from the tomb by two crouching figures (angels, now headless and wingless) aiming to guide her soul to heaven. Made in about 1315 and installed in the church of San Francesco di Castelletto, it was later dismantled and reinstated elsewhere in the church, before being relocated to the garden of a villa. As the caption states: “Its transition from a funerary and devotional image to a decorative element reflects changing attitudes towards and uses of sculptural fragments.”

Beyond Margaret is a tall, double-sided plinth, containing a series of heads. They are placed at eye level – the better for us to empathise with them, according to the curators. “Their varying states of brokenness reflect many forces: natural erosion, political upheaval, iconoclasm, excavation, looting, restoration, and reuse,” states the accompanying caption. “Breakage focuses attention on their features, expressions, and the traces of history.” It certainly brings their expressions and textures into focus.

A head of a goddess, probably Aphrodite, from the amphitheatre the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, dated the second century AD, appears to have “tears” running down one of her cheeks; streaks of oxidisation caused by rain on the sculpture’s bronze eyelashes. A crowned head of a Vietnamese Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in bronze (from 700-800AD) reveals multiple scratches and scars, making the deity look vulnerable and earthly. We are told the scratches come from farming tools being used in the fields where the statue had lain buried for centuries. 

I am more struck by the look of suffering on the stone face of a woman – a female saint, from an entombment, from Nevers in France. Her pain seems justified and magnified by the erosion of her eyes, forehead and chin. Sears points out that sometimes burial can be a distinct advantage (to an art historian, anyway), as with the Roman Head of an Amazon (c25BC to 15AD), from Herculaneum, whose centuries-long interment under volcanic material meant that the original, painted, coppery colour of her hair has been preserved.

As Dickerson says at the preview, these are not just any fragments. “You can see some of the highest masterpieces of these cultures from around the world. We are not only looking at very interesting stories, part of a larger history but we are in front of really important artworks.”

From heads we move, naturally enough, to torsos, or “bodies”, as Gallery two is titled. For me, there are two standout pieces. One is a headless Crouching Venus. Found in Rome, by the Palazzo del Viminale, this mid-second-century AD marble figure glows with serene grace: the skill that conjures her perfect proportions, the curve of her thigh, her waist, the soft fold of her belly is not diminished by the absence of head, hands or one arm. The remaining, partial arm reaches protectively across her chest. Her beauty and vulnerability are expressed perhaps all the more clearly for these omissions.

The Livorno Torso is also quite the find. Its delicately patinated metal body floats in a free-standing case, the better for us to admire its musculature – a classically Greek kind of macho man, even his pubic hair is lovingly detailed. (And his plight is perhaps rendered more moving by the presence of two bronze testicles, but no penis). The Livorno Torso dates back to the first century BC, and apparently entered the Medici collections in the mid-16th century, “at the behest of Cosimo I, after probably having been brought ashore at the port of Livorno”, according to the caption. Recent restoration removed shell remains, which confirmed the belief that it had lain underwater for centuries, as well as its Greek origins. It was apparently one of the most prized works in the Medici collection.

Gallery three is dedicated to “iconoclasms” – sculptures erected to commemorate key figures or events, but destroyed, dismantled or left to rot due to shifts in political allegiances. There is a large, bronze foot from an equestrian monument to Louis XIV once placed prominently in Paris (designed by François Girardon and cast by John Balthazar Keller, c1692-94) and a single bronze hand from a monument to Louis XV (by Edme Bouchardon, dated 1758). Both these statues were dismembered during the French Revolution. As Sears points out, it takes a huge amount of effort and “great determination” to destroy a bronze monument. What is just as interesting is that these lonely bronze appendages were the body parts that someone felt worth preserving for posterity.

Also torn down during the French Revolution was the elegant, intelligent face belonging to one Head of a Magus, half of which remains, taken from Notre-Dame cathedral, which ended up being “reused in the foundations of a building”. One man’s monument is another man’s rubble … This was the room that perhaps resonated longest after I had left the exhibition. It was worth taking time to sit – grateful for one of very few seats around the exhibition, provided by a deep stone ledge below a window – and ponder the violence that split these bodies apart. What perhaps made this room more impactful was that four or five of the exhibits were placed within the room space, rather than ranged along the perimeter. This meant viewers could circulate freely, and perhaps be reminded that human choices and actions, by people not unlike us, brought these works of art to their grisly end. Most menacing of all, perhaps – because the history is recent – was the head and shoulders of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (from a 1923 statue made by Adolfo Wildt). When this monument was taken down at the end of the second world war, his bronze face was hacked and gouged – as if the intention had been to do real violence to the man.

The exhibits in Gallery four met similar ends, as indicated by the theme War and Colonialism. One of the most interesting pieces here is a headless Khmer statue of Rama, made for the Chen Temple in Cambodia in about 900AD. It was cut from its pedestal during the Cambodian civil war, and the legs and torso were circulated on the illegal art market. It found its way to the Denver Art Museum, which repatriated it in 2016, once it was proved – by tracing a line around the statue’s ankles, which remained embedded in the original plinth, in Cambodia – that the body and plinth belonged together.

Do the stories of rediscovery sometimes eclipse or distract from the art? Occasionally, but they also enrich the experience, as with the insight the curators share of the Egyptian bronze face that is displayed at the end of the gallery. It would have been placed in a royal tomb to house the spirit of the deceased in case they should decide to return. When looters broke into the tomb, they destroyed part of its nose and mouth “so it couldn’t breathe and claim vengeance”, says Sears.

Interestingly, looting is an issue that is touched on only lightly in this exhibition (as is restitution), even though we know that, for all the exhibits in the world’s museums that have been “rescued” from dereliction or neglect – with or without legal permission – there are probably a dozen times as many looted masterpieces still on the illegal art market. The recent news stories about more than 2,000 items going “missing, lost or stolen” from the British Museum collection (in 2023), as well as the robbery of priceless artefacts from the Louvre in 2025, reinforce the fact that there can be many afterlives for the world’s precious treasures.

Moving swiftly on to Gallery five, we contemplate the toll that events such as earthquakes, floods, fire or shipwrecks can take on once-precious items. A standout exhibit in here is The Crouching Boy: the figure of a young man, carved out of marble, his hunkered stance implying he is either preparing to leap for safety or to be lifted, though his raised left arm has decayed to a grizzly stump, as has most of his left leg. Found in 1900 by sponge-divers, this statue – and a bronze Left Arm of a Boxer, displayed nearby – sank when a ship foundered near the Greek island of Antikythera in first century BC. The still-pristine marble elements were preserved because they were buried in the sand. It’s the exposed elements that nature has ruined – but how moving the contrast, in this context.

Sometimes fragments are deployed to make something new, as we find in Gallery six, titled The Reassembled Body. We have a Byzantine Arm Reliquary of Saint Anna – perhaps containing the arm of the same saint. Pieces of saints – arms, fingers, toes, hair, even heads – were traded feverishly among the clergy in the middle ages, as it was thought that the presence of a piece of saint in your church would ensure the prayers of the faithful might be conveyed more swiftly to heaven. Now there’s a fragment sub-category to delve into. It’s a beautiful relic, all the same.

In the same showcase, there is a hand “made of hammered sheets of gold, with inlaid turquoise and silver fingernails”. It was made by a Peruvian tribe called the Lambayeque, who lived on the northern coast. As in many other civilisations, gold was associated with the sun, silver with the moon, and turquoise with the water or sky. Luxury objects that resembled body parts were apparently often placed in royal tombs alongside the mummy, “serving as an extension of the deceased’s body”.

As intriguing, but for different reasons, is the “Restored head and right arm of sleeping Ariadne”, made in the1540s to 1580s. According to the caption: “Ferdinando I de Medici acquired fragments of the statue of Sleeping Ariadne for his villa on Rome’s Pincian Hill.” This head and right arm were carved to complete the sculpture, but on a slightly reduced scale – the suggestion was that they were made from “parts of the statue that were beyond repair”. It was rediscovered in storage in 1883.

I was also drawn to an African Youth statuette – the head is Egyptian, c180-150BC, but the body is from some time before 1590. The head is extraordinary – upturned eyes vivid in a skilfully carved face. Paradoxically, the level of detail in this much older head contrasts strikingly with the cracks and rough-handling evident in the newer body.

Gallery seven is a small room dedicated to Vietnamese artist Danh Vo. At first glance, the three works here seem rather less than the sum of their parts: a c16th-century cupid, for example, is attached to a piece of flimsy wood. Some stone fragments are tucked away, out of sight, in a Rimowa suitcase. However, the suitcase refers to a work he made in 2008: to transport a 16th-century wooden statue of Saint Joseph without paying shipping costs, he cut it into pieces so that they could be carried on as hand luggage, later exhibiting them in the suitcase. 

Gallery eight is themed Sculpting the Fragment. The dominant element – physically and symbolically – in the room is the Roman Right Hand of a Colossal Statue, dating from the first to fourth century. The hand, discovered in the 18th century, entered the collections of the Capitoline museum. It was once thought to be the hand of Colossus of Constantine, but its wrist is too narrow to join the surviving forearm.

In this room is the aforementioned Rodin Walking Man and Model of a Nude Woman (c1533), a terracotta model of an incomplete female figure by Michelangelo, to show that fragmentation was an aesthetic many desired. The caption states: “Michelangelo was fascinated with fragments. He drew them, wrote about them, and created sculptures that evoked them – including this one. While the left arm is definitely broken, fingermarks under the edges of the other arm indicate that he deliberately created that arm to stop where it does. The figure was meant to look like a fragment.” The curators mark this as “the very beginning of a dominant trend in western sculpture: the broken figure as a complete work of art”.

Nearby, as if in evidence, we have striking fragmented heads by Bhabha and Anatsui. At the opposite end of the room a bloated white head – all cranium – lurches forwards, on what appears to be one extended limb. Filosofo/Philosopher (1965), a disturbing plaster work by Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish-born artist who survived the Holocaust and settled in Paris in the 1950s, it appears to be a less than flattering statement on the exponents of this discipline. Beside this is a long and sinewy, brown leg (La Jambe, 1958) by Giacometti, conceived as an “autonomous fragment”. Nearby is Bourgeois’s soft, fabric leg displayed in a plastic and metal brace, like the splints once used for wounded soldiers. Called Foot (1997), this fragment, we are told, is “vulnerable and protected”.

Taking up most of the space in the penultimate Gallery nine (also called Sculpting the Fragment) is Julius von Bismarck’s The Elephant in the Room (Otto von Bismarck) (2023). The artist is a descendent of Otto von Bismarck, who in 1871-89 was the first chancellor of the German Empire. He has replicated a life-sized figure of his ancestor on horseback, but attached each segment to a rope structure that allows it to almost disintegrate, and then slowly reform – like the classic “push puppet”. The creaking of these ropes, on its slow descent and ascent create an eerie backdrop. 

The final room is dedicated to a bizarre but compelling work by Paul Pfeiffer, from a series called Incarnator (2018-), in which he explores the fetishisation and deification of the modern celebrity. To make this work, Pfeiffer commissions incarnadores – practitioners of ancient techniques of craftsmanship who create realistic flesh-like body parts for crucifixes and shrines. Here, incarnadores from Mexico, Spain and the Philippines have fashioned individual components of Justin Bieber: his head, torso, legs and arms. It is intriguing that the finished models, worked from the same original materials, are similar but not identical. These parts are scattered across two walls, looking – albeit without the gore – more like an explosion or bizarre accident in a mortuary, and less like a form of worship. It is certainly less poetic than the resting, Buddha-like, partially finished head by the Dutch-Belgian artist Mark Manders that sits in the courtyard of this handsome Renaissance building, part of his Silent Studio (Reduced to 88%) (2005-26) installation.

Manders places this Tilted Head (2015-26) – which looks like clay but is a resin cast of an original clay model – at the centre of what he calls “a temporary studio”. To evoke this studio, we see office furniture, but reduced by 88% – two lounge chairs and two lightweight studio chairs. They trigger feelings of familiarity and, due to their scale, mild displacement. These are accompanied by piles of newspapers also created by the artist, in which he has used every word in the English language – but only once, and randomly arranged. So, they remain unreadable. It is a scene and work that invites contemplation and closer investigation and is thus an apt amuse-bouche for the visual pleasures and wide-ranging historical and philosophical challenges of the works awaiting you in the gallery upstairs.

• Broken: The Power of the Fragment will be presented in a newly conceived version at Washington’s National Gallery of Art from 13 March to 27 June 2027.

The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge
23 September 2026 – 28 February 2027

by ANNA McNAY

For the academic year 1985-86, the artist-in-residence post, offered as part of a Cambridge-wide residency scheme, organised in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, was offered to the American feminist conceptual artist Mary Kelly (b1941, Iowa). Despite the scheme having run since 1977, Kelly was the first woman to hold the post, which offered a studio space, room and board in a college, a stipend of £9,500, free access to the university’s academic resources, such as lectures and libraries, and an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard. Initially, Kelly was told by an Arts Council officer that she should not see her husband and child even at weekends as this would prove too great a distraction from her work. Thankfully, however, Hilary Gresty, the then curator at Kettle’s Yard, intervened, and New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), upholding its status as a site of feminist academe, different from the other colleges and academic environments in Cambridge at the time, provided Kelly with a three-bedroom flat.¹ 

One of the outcomes of Kelly’s residency was the work Extase, a six-panel installation, which forms part of a larger work, Corpus (Body), exploring women’s bodies and aging in relation to the five so-called “passionate attributes” that late-19th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot used to describe hysterical women. In Extase, three panels of text are interspersed by three images of folded clothing, both annotated in red. The texts deliberately imitate the confessional language of women’s magazines. The annotations and highlighting evoke the feeling of doing something wrong somewhere where it matters (eg, school or college) or of editorial copy. The clothing operates as a trace of Kelly’s lived experience, providing a self-portrait of sorts that emerges as a process, rather than a fixed likeness. It should be noted that Corpus, in turn, comprises one of four thematic sections of the larger work Interim (1984-89), the very title of which suggests some kind of undefined liminal period of change or development. At the end of Kelly’s residency, Extase was acquired by New Hall, and it went on to become the first work of the Women’s Art Collection, which now, four decades later, tallies more than 600 works of art. 

The Women’s Art Collection is an amazing thing – a free museum, on display all around the Chamberlin, Powell and Bon-designed college (the same architects as designed the Barbican, and which, still acting differently from other Cambridge colleges, is open to the public), in the dining room, in the common rooms, in the hallways, in the garden. There is also, if you’re lucky enough to find it, a small corridor gallery used for temporary exhibitions. The current exhibition is of Extase, accompanied by loan works by nine contemporary artists and archival material, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the collection and asking the question: “How do artists experience, activate and rework memory and history while imagining possible futures?” In other words: What is still relevant from the earlier days of feminist and queer theory? What has changed and what has not? What needs now to change? As the curator Laura Moseley writes in her introduction to the booklet printed to accompany the exhibition: “The work [Extase] emerged from a moment in which feminist art and theory became newly self-aware as political, intellectual and aesthetic projects.”²

In an interview with the art historian Amy Tobin in the exhibition booklet, Kelly notes of Extase: “Today younger audiences often say it reminds them of blogs, which is amusing because blogs didn’t exist at the time. But that shift in language allows the work to keep speaking across generations.”³ Something about the work is still relevant and vital today. Tobin notes that her students are often surprised when she instructs them to stop reading the text panels and to focus, instead, on the work as a whole, making connections – and ultimately meaning – between images, text and history. (Accordingly, the exhibition text panel is placed after the Kelly work, bridging with the contemporary loans.) Harriet Loffler, the director of the Women’s Art Collection, adds that Kelly intended the panels to be like those found at bus stops – even to the extent that you see your outline reflected and thus feel yourself implicated. 

We are implicated, too, in the contemporary works that speak directly to us, most notably Rachael House’s Assume Nothing (2025), a glazed, oval-shaped platter, decorated with the words: “How dare you presume I’m cisgender.” For House, the ceramic form evokes traditional commemorative platters like those made for royal weddings and coronations, but this association is subverted through reference to activist culture. The historical, the subversive and the everyday are compressed in a simple yet highly impactful manner.

Olivia Plender’s Our Bodies are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power (2022), part of a project with the Glasgow Women’s Library, likewise shouts out to its audience, through the reimagining of an educational healthcare poster with imagery from Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (1973) (a copy of which is in the vitrine opposite – sadly not where we can delve into its contents), which was groundbreaking at the time – it was self-published in 1970 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective – for its discussion of abortion, sexuality, gender identity, birth control, menopause and more.

We hardly need reminding that many of the inequalities and struggles identified in the booklet remain unsolved, and that healthcare continues to be shaped by wider systems of power. Also still salient are the rallying cries in Helen de Main’s Childcare Now! (2023), which comprises a number of screenprints as part of a larger series responding to the artist’s research into childcare campaigns led by feminist groups in the 1970s and 80s.

Further reference to the media comes in the form of Lorna Hamilton-Brown’s WE MEK Knitted Magazine Cover – Issue One (2021), which transforms the familiar format of a magazine cover into a space for being seen and historical reflection. (WE MEK is patois for “we make”.) Ellen Lesperance’s I Oppose Thatcher’s Britain / Power Corrupts (for Juley Howard) (2024) comprises archival fragments relating to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp mixed with her own knitting patterns, and Sarah-Joy Ford’s Archives and Amazons (2021) is stitched in lavender, a colour term used since the early-20th century as a code word, symbol and descriptive label for homosexual people and culture. Speaking especially to Kelly’s work is Sadé Mica’s Getting There (2026), a chest binder decorated with cross-stitched text, including the Biblical parody:

“I am not what I make of me, I never have been.
I am not how you maketh me, I never have been.”

All four of these works also invoke traditionally feminine crafts, subverting their use to question the heteronormative white patriarchy. 

In the vitrines opposite, there are numerous magazines and fanzines, newsletters and artists’ publications spanning the past five decades and tracing the vital role that independent publishing has played in creating spaces for political debate, artistic experimentation and collective knowledge beyond – or, in the case of New Hall, within (but also without) – mainstream institutions. These include Spare Rib, Sappho and THING, a magazine documenting Black queer art, music and culture during the HIV/Aids crisis. Issues of Radical Deviance: A Journal of Transgendered Politics – each one about 40 pages long, A4, saddle-stitched and bearing the intent of promoting and securing the nascent project of trans theory in the UK – are also on display for the first time. 

The final two contemporary pieces are Kelly O’Brien’s “Magic” Memories (2024), which explores the relationship between labour, family and class, and Ebun Sodipo’s Self Portrait / I Am My Ancestors’ Tongue (2025), which brings together fragments of imagery, creating a self-portrait that follows “the pathway that I took to womanhood”. This, really, summarises the exhibition as a whole.

One final section worth a mention is a vitrine of letters between Kelly and the university, offering her the post and summing up her activities at its close. While it is important to heed the lesson inherent in all the works and archival materials on display, namely that much has not changed over the past four or five decades, it is, I think, also important to acknowledge what has. The fact that we can smile at these letters as evidently dated is a relief. Thanks to colleges such as New Hall, women have been offered a level pegging to men at one of the best universities in the world. And these advances are celebrated also by the Women’s Art Collection. To close with another quote from Kelly’s conversation with Tobin: “The future is always shaped by what we choose to carry forward.”⁴ This exhibition provides us with a good starting point to select from.

References

1. In fact, her family stayed living in London, but the point is that this was their consensual choice.
2. Introduction by Laura Moseley in What Remains. 40th Anniversary of the Women’s Art Collection, exhibition booklet, pages 3-6, page 5.
3. What Remains. A Conversation with Mary Kelly and Amy Tobin, exh booklet, pages 13-22, page 19.
4. Ibid, page 22.