A new exhibition with the compelling title, ‘No Life Without Death’, opens at The Lightbox Museum in Woking. It is presented by Cole-Levi Klimt and curated by Chelsey Chase, bringing together six artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation and cyanotype. The subject, broadly, is mortality as a condition of living rather than an endpoint.
That distinction matters to how the exhibition frames itself. Death is not positioned here as something that arrives at the end of life but as something that runs through it, shaping desire, fear, grief and the capacity to remain present. When grief is resisted, the argument goes, life narrows. When it is faced, something clarifies. It is not a new idea, but it is an honest one, and the quality of an exhibition built around it depends on whether the works carry the weight or merely illustrate the theme.
No Life Without Death: A New Exhibition at The Lightbox Museum, Woking Painting By Paul Freud
The three Cole-Levi Klimt artists are Paul Freud, Meryl Donoghue and Eva Yates. Freud works across painting, drawing and sculpture, navigating the territory between figuration and abstraction through layered mark-making concerned with memory, vulnerability and psychological states.
Donoghue’s practice spans photography, cyanotype, sculpture and installation, combining experimental photographic processes with assembled objects to create work that sits somewhere between scientific observation and folklore. The cyanotype work, in particular, tends to convey a sense of something preserved or fading, which makes it well-suited to this context. Yates, a graduate of the Royal College of Art’s MA Painting programme, makes figurative paintings informed by beauty culture, anxiety and self-perception, working through a neo-surrealist approach that combines classical technique with contemporary psychological territory.
Three guest artists extend the exhibition’s range. Orly Kritzman works with clay, text and material disruption, using artefacts chosen for their geopolitical and material histories and transforming them through processes of breaking, embedding and repair. She has described her practice as a form of future archaeology, a useful way of thinking about work that treats fragility as a structural principle. Ana Luiza Rodrigues, represented by Ricardo Fernandes Gallery, works across photography, sculpture, installation and performance, with a practice rooted in the emotional resonance of everyday objects and the relationship between body and space. Charlotte Worthington, also an RCA MA Painting graduate, came to painting after several years working in television as an animator and documentary producer. She builds works from painting, textiles, metal, stuffing and stitching, constructing fragmented narratives drawn from personal memory and domestic experience. The range of materials is unusual, and the biographical detour through television production is not incidental to the work’s thinking about image-making.
Chelsey Chase founded Cole-Levi Klimt with the explicit aim of creating exhibitions that are both thought-provoking and accessible, drawing on a background spanning music, live events, cultural programming, and the visual arts. No Life Without Death follows two earlier exhibitions, Ephemeral Imprints and Renewal. The programme has a clear thematic consistency across these shows, a sustained interest in impermanence, transformation and the body of feeling that accumulates around loss.
Top Photo: P C Robinson © Artlyst 2026
No Life Without Death, The Lightbox Museum, Woking. Soft preview: 17 June; private view: 20 June; closes: 28 June 2026.