The Art Diary October 2024 – Revd Jonathan Evens

As we approach Christmas, artist monographs are increasingly appearing on the market, so I begin the October Art Diary with several, which are also linked to launch exhibitions. I also feature several exhibitions in sacred spaces before ending with some interesting thematic shows. Among the works featured you will find Leonora Carrington, Ken Currie, Tracey Emin, Susie Hamilton, Ana Maria Pacheco, Michael Petry, and Lancelot Ribeiro, among others. 

Susie Hamilton’s dynamic practice is explored in a monograph published this month. The monograph comprises over 300 paintings in oil and acrylic and numerous works on paper, divided into thematic sections that bring insight to her research. Hamilton is concerned with a wide range of subjects but often focuses on solitary people in impersonal public spaces or natural wildernesses. From the heroic, isolated exploits of astronauts and Arctic explorers to lone shoppers in supermarkets, all subjects are equal under her gaze.

As critic and broadcaster Charlotte Mullins reflects in her introduction, Hamilton’s solitary forms “move across desert, tundra and forests under attack from natural and unknown forces, her often otherworldly figures remain resilient”. However, her work is not all “pain and suffering”, and nor is it solely concerned with the human figure. Mullins writes: “There is joy too, particularly when she turns her probing eye to the natural world. She captures the quizzical gaze and lightning speed of monkeys, white paint splattering the surface as they race through salt flats. We see the lethal precision of a shark in the depths, the pale camouflage of an owl in a snowstorm, the perfect balance of an ape as it leaps from vine to vine.”

The monograph also includes an interview with writer and broadcaster Louisa Buck and an essay by writer, editor, and international curator Anna McNay. The essay discusses Hamilton’s literary influences in detail, highlighting the ways that Hamilton’s own biography shapes the work and informs her perspectives on landscapes, people, and animals.

Art Diary October 2024
Ken Currie
The Crossing III, 2024, Flowers Gallery

‘The Crossing’ is an exhibition by Scottish artist Ken Currie at Flowers Gallery which transports viewers to an unknown archipelago characterised by desolate and barren islands and towering sea stacks. These landscapes, reminiscent of the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, feature eroded rock towers that emerge from a deep, black sea, foaming and spraying at their bases. In this stark and unforgiving environment, an unidentified community endures a precarious existence without shelter. Currie has shared the following words about this new body of work from his studio journal: “People of the Sea. People on the Edge. People at Extremes. Contested Land. Crossing the Sea. Eviction. Evasion. Evacuation. Displacement. Dispossession. Destitution.”

The exhibition accompanies ‘Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings’ compiled and edited by art historian Tom Normand. For over four decades, Currie has created some of the most confrontational and intriguing paintings in the contemporary art world and this monograph provides a unique insight into the thought-world of his challenging and enigmatic art. For the first time, Currie has made available his studio journals, resulting in a fascinating dialogue that explores the motives and aspirations of his inscrutable paintings.

Marcus Lyon’s ‘Alta – A Human Atlas of a City of Angels’ is also being launched in October. ‘Alta’ is a social-impact art project that showcases 100 extraordinary individuals creating positive change across Los Angeles County. Each participant is represented in the work through photographic portraits, DNA maps, and interviews that reveal how their lives intersect with LA – past, present and future – creating a legacy work that documents and conserves a deeper narrative for generations to come about the city, its people and communities.

The project is being shared in several formats, including an exhibition at LA Central Public Library, public activations across regional libraries and outdoor spaces downtown, a podcast, and an interactive book. Accompanying these is a mobile app that allows users to scan each participant’s portrait to listen to their oral histories. Participants were nominated by a diverse group of individuals and institutions from across the county. The project builds on previous Human Atlas projects by Lyon across the globe: ‘Somos Brasil’ (2016), ‘WE: deutschland’ (2018), ‘i. Detroit’ (2020), and ‘De.Coded’ (2023).

‘Tethering Presence’ is a series of photographic images and portraits that capture the many emotional, unconscious, and ritualistic habits connected to the presence of the smartphone and our need to connect. A collaborative project by London-based photographer The1Harris and Manchester-based book designer Micah Purnell, this beautiful coffee table book features over 70 stunning and candid monochrome shots on the tube, in back streets and cafés around London, England.

One-night Book Launches with exhibitions are being held in Manchester and London, enabling the intimate and unguarded moments of stunning monochrome street photography of The1Harris interspersed with thoughtful social commentary by Micah Purnell. Purnell says: “I’ve been totally honoured to work with Harris and curate this stunning book with a sprinkling of the maxims I’m known for throughout. It’s been an absolute pleasure putting it together and I can’t wait for you to see Harris’ work in book form. It’s a thing of beauty!”

Special consideration is also given to selfies and the way in which the mobile phone now operates as a modern-day mirror to the self in Michael Petry’s new book ‘MirrorMirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art’ which is to be published in November 2024. A fascination with mirrors and reflective surfaces is a common theme among artists. ‘MirrorMirror’ presents an intriguing and gloriously illustrated global survey of ‘reflective’ work by more than 150 artists across media, nationalities, genders and locations. The range of works featured invites us to ponder and reflect upon the nature of reality and our place within the world.

Petry’s thought-provoking introduction begins with Jan van Eyck’s celebrated ‘Arnolfini Portrait’, one of the first paintings to feature a significant mirror. Petry then references key works by the great masters – from Diego Velazquez’s ‘The Rokeby Venus’, to Edouard Manet’s complex painting ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergere’ and Claude Cahun’s ‘Reflected Image in Mirror, Checked Jacket’, a seminal photograph for those whose gaze is often upon themselves. Present-day practitioners are no less intrigued, revisiting historical concerns and approaches for contemporary circumstances, often working with modern technologies and materials, from stainless steel to vinyl and from polished obsidian to sunglass lenses. In all these works, the concept of reflection, the notion of creating an alternative space or of opening up space within the frame of the viewer’s interaction with the artwork, has a root in the past. The multitude of artworks in ‘MirrorMirror’ – from monumental installations to the slightest selfie – capture how mirrors appeal to more than just human vanity, but are objects of magic, transformation and power.

The renowned California-based artist David Van Eyssen has two photographic pieces included in ‘MirrorMirror’. MOCA London is featuring Van Eyssen’s work with its first augmented reality exhibition ‘Encounter’. Visitors will enter what appears to be an empty gallery except for a QR code. Once they scan the QR, it will allow them to download the Hoverlay app on their phone and see the work in real-time. On the screen, they will discover that a life-sized car crash occupies the space! They will be able to walk around the two cars and their drivers, who have shot through their windscreens and are suspended above the viewers’ heads. Inside the gallery, the car appears to have crashed through MOCA’s front window. From outside, visitors can see the back end of the car protruding through the glass.  This incredibly life-like work has been geolocated by the artist so that it can only be seen at the MOCA Project Space.

Van Eyssen uses the medium of technology to explore time, memory, and impermanence. Fusing his instinct as a painter with his experience as a filmmaker in projected and screen-based sound and motion works, he has extended his practice to include virtual and augmented reality, photography, lenticulars, and generative extrapolations incorporating photography and AI trained on his own work. His work is also featured in MOCA London’s Autumn WEB exhibition. His online exhibition ‘A Record of Impermanence’ includes ‘A Dis/Appearance’, ‘All Frequencies Are Loud With Signals of Despair’, ‘A Construction Sight’, ‘A Slim Volume of Poetry in No Particular Order’, and photographs from his series, ‘In The Present Absence’.

Another fascinating monograph to be published shortly is ‘Nolan’s Africa’ by Andrew Turley. In this monograph, Turley takes readers on a journey with Sidney Nolan from the United Nations Headquarters in New York to a suspected assassination on the Congo border, from the crematoria of Auschwitz to the formation of the World Wildlife Fund and on to the plains of the Serengeti. He walks in Nolan’s footsteps across Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia, seeing the world through the artist’s eyes. Written over twelve years and across three continents, this is the first book based on the newly opened Sidney Nolan Archives at the National Library of Australia, containing never-before-seen diaries, photographs and personal notes.

The result is a rich narrative that weaves together art, adventure, philosophy, global politics and world history. Artistic influences and processes, breathtaking in their scope, are laid bare as the thoughtful balance of text and images urges readers to consider the effect that the Holocaust, animal extinctions, colonial disenfranchisement and human conflict had on the artist and society. ‘Nolan’s Africa’ is a compelling picture of one of the most complex and famous painters of the twentieth century, shining new light on his examination of nature, human nature and the nature of modern civilisation.

Brian Whelan’s ‘HOLY CITY – A Spiritual Pilgrimage’ at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace reflects Whelan’s vision of unity among the Abrahamic faiths. “Although I have been to many holy cities around the world, these paintings do not depict any holy city that exists in today’s world,” Whelan said of his work. “This is my aspirational vision of what a holy city looks like. Each of the canvases contain churches, mosques, and synagogues, painted in bright, playful and colourful forms. An abstracted, disarming vision of cultural unity; living together in peace, acceptance, and harmony; a haven for the soul.” As with Ravenscroft’s sculpture, the beauty and diversity of Whelan’s inspiring art enables appreciation of the spiritual essence of our shared humanity.

An Irish citizen, Whelan was born in London and has lived on both sides of the Irish Sea. He trained at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Whelan spent 20 years in East Anglia, studying the medieval churches of England. He now resides in Wilton, CT. This exhibition of Whelan’s work follows others on the subject of conflict and war.

‘The Colours of Healing’ is an exhibition of works by Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Brunstein at The National Holocaust Centre and Museum. His powerful work reflects the complex relationship with his Polish Jewish heritage—blending a deep love for Yiddish culture and traditional Jewish communities, with the lingering trauma of their destruction during the Holocaust. Through his art, Brunstein reflects on his personal journey as a Holocaust survivor, using his creations as a means of healing and remembrance. His vibrant and emotive works pay tribute to the traditional Jewish communities, known as “shtetls” or “small towns,” of Eastern Europe that were devastated during the Holocaust.

Brunstein turned to art to process his trauma and keep the memory of those communities alive, making painting his means of healing, a way to preserve his identity and honour the memory of those who perished, including his own family. “Every time I paint, it’s like a treatment,” he said.

‘Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads – In and Out of Our Time’ at Ben Uri also provides a rare glimpse into an émigré artist’s inner thoughts. Born into a Catholic Goan family in present-day Mumbai in 1933, Ribeiro first followed his older half-brother F N Souza to Britain in 1950, in the wake of India’s independence and Partition. After returning to India and becoming an artist, Ribeiro settled permanently in Britain in 1962. Inspired by Indian and Goan architecture and the Christian tradition in which he was raised, he utilised his heads and portraits to explore concepts of power and evil, described by one reviewer as: “Colonialists, kings, tyrants, Christ (resurrected), tycoons, women and thugs” (Bombay Artist Aid Centre review, 1961), among them the monumental ‘Crowned King’ and powerful ‘King Lear’.

Featuring 20 paintings and drawings, the exhibition focuses on Ribeiro’s preoccupation with portraiture and imagined heads from two of the most innovative decades of his practice, the 1960s and the 1990s. This revealing exhibition is part of Ben Uri’s principal focus on researching, digitally documenting, disseminating and celebrating the importance of the Jewish, Refugee, and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900. A supporting display in the lower galleries features a further display of 20 stylistically diverse and innovative paintings, sculptures and works on paper of heads and portraits from the Ben Uri collection by artists including Frank Auerbach, David Breuer-Weil, Dodo, Alfred Harris, Sarah Lightman, Alfred Lomnitz, Hormazd Narielwalla, Oscar Nemon, Mosheh Oved, Paul Richards, and Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin.

‘Wandering in the Shades of Night’ is a series of sculptural installations by Shirley Wiebe at Dal Schindell Gallery. Wiebe is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver. She writes that:

“During a journey to the site of a ruined ancestral Mennonite village in Ukraine, flooded by damming of the Dnieper River, I found only an uncanny staircase deposited on the riverbank. The form of this eerie architectural feature—disconnected from its initial location and function—performs as a memory surrogate for obliteration and flight from persecution.

My process is based on studied physical interaction with materials in unfamiliar combinations. The recurring form of a staircase embodying concepts of passage, challenge, and destination intermingles with other works in a state of perpetual motion, untangling and tangling. This is my way of dismantling the past to manifest the present.

I was raised Mennonite on a Saskatchewan farm outside of the city. A childhood task involved rinsing entrails during butchering. The delicate membrane was slippery, soft, and silky in my fingers. I recall taking great care not to damage it. Seemingly grotesque, to me, it was fascinating and beautiful. Ground pork was stuffed into these casings and smoked (farmer sausage), transferring animal flesh inside its own intestines. The feature piece, Ghost of the Farm, is an installation that pays homage to the allegory of corporeal digestion and cognitive assimilation. Are holding on and letting go oppositional terms, or can they be understood generatively?

I came across a Mennonite hymn my mother used to sing, “I Wandered in the Shades of Night,” and chose it as my title. The exhibition considers how a background of faith and perseverance through persecution and resettlement shapes human destiny.”

Es Devlin unveils ‘CONGREGATION’, a new large-scale choral installation she has created in support of UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, at St Mary Le Strand in October. The work, curated by Ekow Eshun, is commissioned by Kings College London in partnership with The Courtauld. ‘CONGREGATION’ features large-scale chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced forced displacement from their homelands. Presented as a projection-mapped tiered sculpture, the work offers a luminous encounter with those who bring their gifts to London.

The work has been co-authored by 50 portrait sitters, reflecting on their lives in London and their journeys from more than 25 countries, including Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. The accompanying soundscape is composed by Polyphonia, with film sequences created in collaboration with filmmaker Ruth Hogben and choreographer Botis Seva. Each evening at 7:00 PM, the installation will be accompanied by free choral performances fusing the voices of The Genesis Sixteen, The London Bulgarian Choir and the South African Cultural Gospel Choir in the pedestrianised area outside The Courtauld.

Seven carved relief pieces by Ana Maria Pacheco entitled ‘Be Aware’ and made from blocks of limewood, each meticulously carved and adorned with burnished paint and gold leaf, are being displayed in the Old Chapel at Ightham Mote, accompanied by the world premiere of a companion piece of music composed by John Woolrich. Told through vibrant and provocative stories, Pacheco uses timeless, ancient themes from mythology and Catholic iconography to demonstrate our shared humanity and convey messages that are powerfully relevant.

These reliefs are, writes Julian Bell, “seven objects for thought”. They are “physical objects with a weight to them: seven blocks of limewood, each 28 centimetres high, 38 wide and 12 deep, that have been carved in relief with deep, shadowed undercuts and in places studded with nails and wires”. They are: “seven tableaux: seven knots of strange behaviour. Examine their content, and you will encounter seven styles of blind-heartedness, given imaginative form by a reflective intelligence. We might opt to call them ‘sins’ and to identify each with an eye to the old theologians’ checklist: ‘Pride’, ‘Greed’, ‘Lust’, ‘Envy’, ‘Anger’, ‘Gluttony’ and ‘Sloth’. And yes, Pacheco has here been mulling over that ancient analysis of human behaviour. Yet these compositions have, in effect, slipped away from their moorings in morality. Put another way: they turn ‘sin’ – their ‘deadly’ initial premise – into something of vital worth. For what they embody, in their intricacies and their heavinesses, is the will to distil experience, to concentrate, and to reflect intensively. To be aware.”

Art Diary October 2024
Michael Takeo Magruder, Reconstructed Landscape (s) – Central Park, installation at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Times Square NYC 2024. Image courtesy of the artist

‘Un/familiar Terrain{s}’ is an exhibition series by British-American visual artist Michael Takeo Magruder arising from a sophisticated partnership between artist and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This creative ‘collaboration’ transforms personal footage captured on AI-enabled smartphones into otherworldly installations rooted in specific places of renowned natural beauty.

‘Reconstructed Landscape{s} – Central Park’ is the latest work in this ongoing project. Created for the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Times Square, the installation is a pair of ‘tapestries’ generated from a digital photograph of New York City’s renowned green space. The ordinary scene is remade into a moment of striking luminosity through a sequence of processes that alternate between traditional media production tools and leading-edge AI systems. Focusing on an area of the flowering treescape, each pixel in the composition is expanded, producing an aesthetic reminiscent of stained-glass windows. The natural world is thus suffused with technology, encouraging viewers to consider the synthetic nature of their memories and inviting them to reimagine the world anew.

Also to be found in a church space are fifteen sculptures by Laurence Edwards from his leaf series, including new pieces which have been created especially in response to Winchester Cathedral. His exhibition in the north transept at Winchester Cathedral presents a series of ethereal, cut-through, transmorphic figures particularly inspired by the history of the Great West Window: “I was blown away by the great West Window of Winchester Cathedral which itself had been blown away by Oliver Cromwell, only for the fragments of glass to be collected and reassembled by the people of the town, the resulting assemblage of fragments and light seemed a great metaphor for the exhibition I’m about to have in the Cathedral. With my bronze figures dissolving and coalescing in cycles through this spectacular building, I try to trace attempts that have been made at making sense of our place in the world through the lens of this magnificent space.”

Leaves and quincunx (the geometric pattern of four-sided shapes with a solitary figure in their centre) are in the experimental work within the show. These works originate in the wax state of the bronze casting process, a territory Edwards has made uniquely his own. They speak to the sense of light as matter entering and exiting the physical presence of the figure as a volume. They evoke the sense of windows and also of ephemerality, a sort of visual translucency of the present, the past, and the forthcoming.

Emma McNally’s show at The Drawing Room is her first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and her most ambitious installation to date. In ‘The Earth is Knot Flat’ she takes the raw materials of drawing – paper, graphite, gum arabic, kaolin – and upends them: crumpling, folding, twisting, perforating, scoring and rotating these components to produce large-scale, undulating works that tumble into the gallery like rock debris deposited by a glacier, pocked with cavities and recesses for nestling in. With no front or back, up or down, these surfaces are covered with a carbon patina, caked-on like soot or built up with an accumulation of mark-making – tangles of eddying ellipses or staccato scratches made using the hand and machines such as sanders or drills. Smaller works fidgeted together from wires, mesh and crochet are suspended in the air like cobwebbed clouds.

These works interact with each other rhythmically like notes in a score, without dominating logic or boundaries, forming a sensory ensemble. They are informed by geological processes, weather patterns, coral formations, planetary movements, and atom bombs – a ‘complex topography’ of intricate systems in which each part is inescapably interconnected to the other. In this installation, McNally scrambles the elements of drawing, generating multi-dimensional disruptive works that draw attention to the entangled complexity of existence in an age of extractive capitalism and environmental breakdown.

Eva Bosch is a Catalan painter, writer and video maker born in Barcelona who is exhibiting with Benjamin Rhodes Arts. At present, she lives and works in London, and she regularly visits her atelier in Malgrat de Mar (Barcelona), combining her studio work with lecturing in the History of Art. She writes: “I grew up in Montmany-Figueró, a small village north of Barcelona where the novel “Els Sots Ferestecs” (Dark Vales), written in 1901 by Raimon Casellas, takes place. This village has haunted me all my life, and it has been a great source of inspiration for my work … In the last fifteen years, I have researched prehistoric painting in Europe as well as in residencies in Senegal and Turkey … The study of prehistoric paintings has reinforced my belief that the urge for mark making did not change throughout millennia. The marks left behind by an individual portray a moment in time expressing an emotion or a need. What gives them value is the feeling they arouse, which is universal, but like fingerprints, is different for every viewer.”

Ansel Krut writes of her work: “… Each of Bosch’s paintings starts, and ends, with stories that are both personal and universal. Her protagonists are the shapes, the forms, she uses. They look pre-existent, as though drawn from a bank of universal human archetypes, but actually, they evolve through hours in the studio, morphing on the canvas, gaining and losing heads, swapping genders, growing limbs, until they find themselves and their relationships one to the other. Evocative and suggestive, operating through symbols and mood rather than through linear narrative, each image unfolds for the artist as she paints, finding its way through her memories and influences, coalescing around her expressive urgency …”

Art Diary October 2024
Leonora Carrington, The Night of the Eighth 1987, ©The Artists Estate. courtesy The Roland Penrose Collection

‘Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances’ at Firstsite marks 50 years since the English translation of ‘The Hearing Trumpet’, Carrington’s 1974 novel, was published and offers a fresh exploration of her extraordinary life, career and travels. Featuring over 50 artworks and objects by the British-Mexican artist and by the artistic friends she made through her travels, as well as artefacts from museums, viewers can explore an exciting blend of rare paintings, drawings and prints depicting dream-like and nightmarish images where enchanting characters and creatures come alive in a magical and symbolic dreamscape.

Carrington spent some of her early school years in the east of England. She attended New Hall School, a convent in Chelmsford, but her rebellious spirit led to her expulsion – likely fuelled by a lack of understanding of her dyslexia. These formative years, along with the enchanting local surroundings, left a lasting imprint on her art. Throughout her remarkable career, she created mystical, magical works, weaving together religious iconography, patriarchal symbols, witchcraft, and fairy-tale elements. Her signature small brushstrokes explored deeply personal and universal themes like female sexuality, nature, alchemy, and gender bias. ‘Avatars & Alliances’ sheds new light on her art by exploring its complexity and diversity through a neurodivergent perspective, going beyond conventional interpretations.

The exhibition also showcases Jessie Makinson, a contemporary of Carrington. Her large paintings show dreamy, fairytale-like scenes in dramatic settings. Makinson mixes science fiction and folklore, creating hybrid creatures that are part human, part animal. These characters take over colourful landscapes, inviting us to rethink our ideas about fantasy and power.

Tracey Emin returns to White Cube Bermondsey with her solo exhibition, ‘I followed you to the end’, a presentation of new paintings and sculptures that journey through love and loss, mortality and rebirth. Drawing from a recent transformative experience, Emin continues her exploration of life’s most profound and intimate moments with renewed intensity. In several of the works, the veil between life and death is thin and permeable, a diaphanous threshold through which the artist’s figures appear to make contact with the Beyond.

Likewise, Emin’s instinctive process involves veiling and unveiling: she often paints an image on canvas only to obscure it later with additional layers of white, leaving behind a spectral impression of the over writ form, as can be seen in ‘Take me to Heaven’. Here, the subject assumes a tranquil repose, as if drifting into another realm. To the left, a pale lavender presence – conjured through this technique – appears beside the protagonist, serving as a proxy for the artist’s deceased mother. Depicted within a room adorned with blue floral-patterned wallpaper, the serenity of the scene is abruptly ruptured by a violent gush of red from the subject’s torso, wrenching the transcendent moment back to the immediacy of the present.

Though painting has become increasingly central to Emin’s practice in recent years, she has continued to create sculpture, as evidenced by the two new bronze works featured in this exhibition. The smaller counterpart, ‘Ascension’, presents a female torso in repose and echoes the figure depicted in ‘My Dead Body – A Trace of Life’, although mounted on the wall in a manner reminiscent of a crucifixion. The monumental sculpture, ‘I Followed You To The End’, commands the central space of the South Galleries. At first glance, its form appears abstract, with textured ridges and dimpled impressions suggestive of a rugged landscape. Navigating around and drawing back from the work, the lower anatomy of a figure reveals itself, with sprawled legs ambiguously parted as tender invitation or brutal subjugation. With its deeply worked surfaces directly capturing the imprints from moulding by the artist’s hand, the sculpture evokes a sensuous intimacy that belies its vast scale.

Finally, this month, are two thematic shows. Ikon’s ‘Friends in Love and War / L’Éloge des meilleur·es ennemi· es’ explores friendship as one of our most important human relationships. The exhibition presents works by over twenty artists from the British Council Collection and French institution macLYON’s collection. Artworks by artists including Tracey Emin, Paula Rego, Sonia Boyce, Kenneth Armitage and Lubaina Himid unravel the intricacies of friendship in a contemporary world, exploring how this universal yet complex relationship empowers us to share life experiences, broaden horizons and build collective futures.

The exhibition includes painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, film, sculpture, and installation to provide a rich insight into personal and diplomatic friendships. It will tour the partner cities of Lyon and Birmingham while considering how regional capitals and cultural institutions can create new ways of living and working together in a post-Brexit world.

Also in Birmingham is ‘Scent & the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites’ at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. The link between scent and memory has long been recognised and that certain smells can instantly evoke strong emotions and recollections. For the Victorians, sensory details in paintings were thought to be able to trigger a variety of visceral responses: a still life of flowers might prompt the viewer to believe they could smell the blooms. The exhibition aims to evoke the smells of objects and scenes depicted in some of the most iconic works by Pre-Raphaelite artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse. The exhibition also showcases works by three less familiar female artists of the period: Evelyn de Morgan, Anna Alma-Tadema and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.

This is also the first public UK exhibition to feature the unique AirParfum technology developed by Puig, the Spanish fashion and fragrance house, which will bring to life two key paintings with custom-designed scents. Three specially crafted scents have been developed to evoke aspects of Millais’s ‘The Blind Girl’ and Simeon Solomon’s ‘A Saint of the Eastern Church’. Using the sense of smell will enable gallery visitors to explore the works like never before, thanks to this enhanced, multi-sensory experience. For Solomon’s watercolour, which depicts a haloed young man wearing a gleaming tunicle, a vestment traditionally worn during the Catholic celebration of Mass, Puig has developed a scent that conveys incense, along with notes of myrtle, white flowers, and dark amber woods. The perfume evokes not only the incense but the saint and his robe, along with the golden walls and dark columns of the setting.

The exhibition also explores scent and spiritual renewal. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s ‘The Lover’s World’ depicts a girl wearing a green dress who gazes at a pair of songbirds perched amongst blossom-laden blackthorn. Meanwhile, among the dewy grasses and daisies at her feet, fairy attendants swing golden censers billowing clouds of incense. While the symbolism of rainbow and nature suggest spiritual renewal, the incense burners – like those in Solomon’s watercolour – would have recalled the contemporary ‘bells and smells’ controversy over the outlawing of incense in Anglican liturgy.

Lead image: David Van Eyssen, Encounter, MOCA London

 

‘Susie Hamilton’ –  Visit Here

‘Radiance and Shadows’, Paul Stolper Gallery, 8 October – 19 October 2024 – Visit Here

‘Ken Currie: The Crossing’, Flowers Gallery, 9 October – 16 November 2024 – Visit Here

‘Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings‘  Visit Here

‘Alta – A Human Atlas of a City of Angels’ – Visit Here

Tethered Presence Manchester, Studio Manchester, Wednesday, 9 October 2024 –

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Tethered Presence London, Photobookcafe, Tuesday, 19 November 2024 – Visit Here

MirrorMirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art’ – Visit Here 

‘David Van Eyssen: Encounter’, MOCA London, ​29 Sept – 26 Oct 2024 – Visit Here

‘Nolan’s Africa’ – Visit Here

‘HOLY CITY – A Spiritual Pilgrimage’, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, October 15 – November 22 2024 – Visit Here

Colours of Healing The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, 5 September – October –

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‘Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads – In and Out of Our Time’, Ben Uri, 18 September – 29 November 2024 – Visit Here

‘Wandering in the Shades of Night’, Dal Schindell Gallery, 4 September – 30 October 2024 –

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‘Be Aware’ Ana Maria Pacheco, Ightham Mote, 29 September – 3 November 2024 – 

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‘Congregation’, St Mary le Strand church, 3 October – 9 October 2024 – Visit Here

Reconstructed Landscape{s} – Central Park’, Church of St Mary the Virgin, Times Square, 29 September – 29 November 2024 –  Visit Here

‘Borrowed Breath: Art exhibition by Laurence Edwards’, Winchester Cathedral, 6th September – 5th November 2024 – Visit Here

‘Emma McNally: The Earth is Knot Flat’, Drawing Room 2 October – 15 December 2024 –

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‘Eva Bosch: Shoes and Stars Paintings 1997 to now’, Benjamin Rhodes Arts, 25 September—25 October 2024 – Visit Here

‘Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances’, Firstsite, Saturday 26 October 2024 – Sunday 23 February 2025 – Visit Here

‘Tracey Emin: I followed you to the end’, White Cube Bermondsey, 19 September – 10 November 2024 – Visit Here 

‘Friends in Love and War – L’Éloge des Meilleur·es Ennemi·es. Works from the British Council Collection and macLYON’, Ikon Gallery, 2 October 2024 – 23 February 2025 –

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‘Scent & the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites’, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 11 October 2024 – 26 January 2025 – Visit Here 

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