Tate has unquestionably gone for the proverbial juggler, throwing virtually everything into the mix with 196 works on display, 95 of which are from their own collection. The Fighting Temeraire and The Haywain are noticeable in their absence, but there’s more than enough to quench the taste buds without them. Constable’s first six-footer, The White Horse (1819), on loan from the Frick across the pond, is viewable in the UK for the first time in over 20 years. Another work unseen in these shores since 1883, Turner’s painting of the former Houses of Parliament ablaze in The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 (1834) sears its way into the retina.

A walled timeline in the opening room really underscores how much sooner Turner was able to gain recognition. Entering the Royal Academy at 14, by the age of 27, he had become elected a full academician, an honour not bestowed upon Constable until he was 52. The Suffolk native would only receive his first mention in the press at 31. Differing in temperaments but close in age, much has been made of their rivalry both during and after their lifetimes, with the critic Edward Dubois – quoted here – referring to them as “fire and water”. Turner’s legendary upstaging act when he added a red buoy to his seascape, Helvoetsluys: The City of Utrecht, 645, Going to Sea (1832), just as Constable was varnishing The opening of Waterloo Bridge at the 1832 RA annual exhibition, is naturally mentioned here. Rather than securing the former from its current Japanese home, Tate has opted to show a clip of the incident portrayed in the 2014 film Mr Turner, with Timothy Spall playing the title role. Constable’s Waterloo Bridge work, on which he laboured for 13 years, is featured here; however, the artist’s scarlet-flecked Thames scene clearly prompts Turner’s concern at the prospect of his cool-toned seascape making less of an impact. Interestingly, Tate curator Amy Concannon has made the decision to lay more emphasis upon another historic episode. When invited to hang the annual Summer Exhibition in 1831, Constable incurred the wrath of his famous compatriot by ensuring his dramatic work, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1829-31), was hung next to Turner’s similarly large Caligula’s Palace and Bridge (1831). Now those jousting works are reunited. 

Encompassing 12 rooms and essentially arranged chronologically, Rivals and Originals reveals both men elevating British landscape painting to new heights. It’s intriguing to see Turner and Constable’s careers juxtaposed alongside each other. In many ways, they are opposites: Turner searching for meaning in the universal and the sublime, Constable in his beloved Suffolk landscape. The Londoner was by far the more travelled of the two men, his sketchbooks testifying to his particular exploration of the light and historical sites of Italy, Switzerland and France. Bewitchingly, vivid sketchbooks belonging to both artists offer telling insight into their working approaches throughout this show. Also on display are other possessions: paintboxes, oil paint-covered palettes, joined by Constable’s surprisingly diminutive folding sketching chair and even Turner’s fishing rod and reel. There’s something very elegant about Constable’s beautifully inscribed entry ticket for an RA lecture, a far cry from modern times.

Turner certainly had a taste for the grandeur of classical landscape. His travels, be they across mainland Europe or Britain, provided him with the visual stimulus to create works of universal significance. Throughout, one finds him drawing on the awesome power of nature to generate the dramatic effect of his narrative, a clear case in point being Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812). On display at Tate, the epic painting finds the legendary enemy of Rome and his Carthaginian army’s ambition to attack their hated foe thwarted by a violent snowstorm in the Alps. Perhaps the artist is using the archaic event as a metaphor to Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia, which took place the same year of its completion. Like with Turner’s famous late work of a stricken steamship in peril, the storm’s terrifying vortex dominates the composition, relegating Hannibal and his army to distinctly minor positions. The Londoner’s mature phase sees him conjuring up the visionary works that would so stir the French Impressionists in future decades. Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843) is palpably a love note to the sublime beauty of light and air. Expressibly depicting Moses at work on the opening chapter of the Bible, the prophet is almost indistinguishable from the sky. Turner gives far greater pictorial importance to the swirling mass of yellow, engendering a sense of the sun shining in the aftermath of the Flood, signifying spiritual rebirth and creation. Channelling Goethe’s theory on Light and Colour, published in 1810, the artist produces atmospheric effects with a vibrant palette, prioritising intense emotional experiences over realistic scenes.

Critics, with John Ruskin numbered amongst them, have often had a tendency to regard John Constable as a relatively conventional figure when compared to Turner, his contemporary. It is undeniably true that the son of a mill owner found constant inspiration from his particular part of rural Suffolk, his deep connection with his surroundings giving rise to works such as Flatford Mill from the Lock (1812). However, as the current exhibition increasingly bears out, the ostensibly prosaic nature of his settings should not be confused with a lack of artistic vision or originality.  Close inspection of his canvases on display reveals his radical mark-making, quite at odds with the smooth application favoured by more conservative artists at the time. Interestingly, Amy Concannon holds the view that Constable showed an inclination towards technical innovation earlier than his great rival. Many of Constable’s sketches on show have an amazing immediacy: a clear example being his stunning pencil drawing Fir Trees at Hampstead (c. 1833) and Rainstorm over the Sea (1828). Created in Brighton when the artist was visiting his tuberculosis-suffering wife, the latter’s flurry of black clouds carries a terrible sense of foreboding as well as offering more evidence of his expressiveness.

Constable’s remarkable cloud studies from earlier in the 1820s prove terrifically spontaneous evocations of the skies above us two centuries ago. Late period canvases like On the River Stour (1834) frequently see the artist using his palette knife to apply oil paint densely into the image; those characteristic white streaks of his are an almost savage act of abstraction. Exhibition organisers have sought to identify similarities between the artists: both men surprisingly received no training in oil painting during their RA education, forcing them to learn from scratch. On occasions, Constable’s sketches, such as Rainstorm over the Sea, resemble the hand of Turner, but generally speaking, paintings by the respective greats prove far easier to distinguish.

Destined to be forever pitted against each other by the gods of art history, Turner and Constable continue to impact upon subsequent generations as the years rumble on. Tate brings this epic saga to a close with a short new film featuring eminent contemporary artists: Bridget Riley, Frank Bowling, George Shaw and Emma Stibbon offering their thoughts on the respective legacies of both men. Compelling, myth-busting, frequently awe-inspiring, this clash of the best of British reinforces Turner’s radicalism whilst simultaneously making a mockery of claims that Constable was a mere sentimental, one-dimensional capturer of a lost rural idyll. This is a tremendous show, not to be missed.

James White
Photos:

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals is at Tate Britain from 27^th November 2025 until 12^th April 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.

At the centre of Warmeng is a reimagining of female internal organs as fluid symbolic architectures. Through 3D modelling, Yuna renders these organs as trembling constellations – structures carrying the sediment of emotional labour, maternal responsibility, and the soft violences that accompany care. Her organs swell and contract like quiet testaments to the unseen labour that sustains life. In her work, anatomy is transformed from medical diagram to lyrical topography, where vulnerability becomes a mode of knowledge and resistance.

This exhibition positions Warmeng in conversation with Yuna’s earlier explorations – Love to Fish, a fable of emotional self-erasure; identity of yuna, an interrogation of inherited femininity; and Yoyo’s Museum, a return to childhood as the first site of discipline and dreaming. Throughout these chapters, recurrent symbols emerge – fish, apples, cages, organs – forming a personal mythology through which Yuna articulates the shifting boundaries of agency, desire, and identity. Her work attests to the way a woman is formed not once, but repeatedly – through love, through survival, through the responsibilities of motherhood, through the expectations quietly inscribed upon her body.

The exhibition carries profound social resonance. In a cultural moment marked by strained maternity systems, rising maternal mental health burdens, and widespread undervaluation of caregiving, Yuna’s imagery gives form to a reality often spoken about only in abstraction. The pressures placed on women – especially mothers – are not incidental; they are structural. In Warmeng, these forces appear not as slogans but as tremors within the organs themselves, as distortions within the body’s architecture, as emotional sediment deposited over time. The work’s intimacy is inseparable from its politics.

It is within this social context that the exhibition is presented in support of Birth Companions, a charity dedicated to women and babies facing severe disadvantage. The collaboration articulates a shared conviction: maternal wellbeing is a collective responsibility, not a private endurance. By aligning Yuna’s symbolic anatomies with the charity’s advocacy, Graffik Gallery extends the exhibition’s reach beyond representation into real-world support.

Graffik Gallery, with its roots in London’s street art scene and an original Banksy in its courtyard, has long been associated with artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives and foreground the marginalised. Hosting Warmeng continues that lineage. If Banksy critiques the structures of society from its public walls, Yuna critiques them from within the body’s inner chambers – offering a counter-mapping of power that begins at the level of flesh, memory, and care. The gallery’s support signals a recognition that the politics of the body is as urgent as the politics of the street.

In its philosophical depth, poetic sensibility, and socio-political urgency, Warmeng stands as Yuna’s most resonant statement to date. As a mother-artist, she offers not only images but testimonies – an anatomy of becoming that honours the complexity of women’s inner lives while challenging the structures that seek to shape them.

The editorial unit

Yuna Yudan Ding’s Warmeng is at Graffik Gallery, 284 Portobello Rd London W10 5TE, from 3^rd to 9^th December 2025. For further information visit the gallery’s website here.

Each of the exhibition’s 14 sections is dedicated to one of Anderson’s movies, laid out in chronological order so one can observe how his career, and particularly his process, evolved. It aims to investigate the film-making techniques that went into crafting Anderson’s fictional worlds, a journey told through over 700 objects, many taken from Anderson’s own archives and never before seen by the public. These range from the personal, polaroids and handwritten notebooks, to the technical, storyboards and character sketches, to thrillingly recognisable costumes, props and set pieces. 

The exhibition draws the viewer’s attention to the connections between the objects. Iconic costumes such as the red tracksuits worn in The Royal Tenenbaums or the striking purple concierge uniform worn from The Grand Budapest Hotel are displayed next to the sketches they originated from. Anderson’s storyboards gradually change from pencilled sketches to animatics featuring his own voice. Throughout, the exhibition features clips from the features themselves, and in one case, music from the soundtrack of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, allowing us to see how the finished product compares to the work that went into it. Curator Savi commented that the exhibition’s curatorial aim was to strike a delicate balance between what is in the films and what is hidden, and it does this masterfully. 

The identical layout of the sections becomes slightly repetitive and predictable about midway through the exhibition, and yet each room captures the tone and mood of its movie with a precision that is wonderfully immersive. Each title has its own set of codes, motifs and references that are instantly recognisable – entering a room, even those less familiar with Anderson’s work can tell which film is being honoured. Even the deep red colour of the walls evokes Anderson’s favoured colour palettes, creating the sense that one is stepping into one of his stories. The section on The French Dispatch, too, is dominated by the wall-length pink and orange murals seen in the “Concrete Masterpiece” segment of the narrative.

There’s a sense of charm and whimsy that comes from observing some of these props, particularly the plethora of stop-motion puppets of the fantastical sea creatures from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the animals of Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs. The chance to peer into miniature models of set pieces, such as the candy-pink Great Budapest Hotel, the pastel vending machines from Asteroid City, and the Darjeeling Limited express, adds to the sense of immersion and tangibility. 

More charming still were the props crafted for the fictional pieces that exist within the films, specially commissioned by Anderson: the Boy With Apple painting inherited by Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or the books written by characters in The Royal Tenenbaums or read by Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom. Carefully detailed fake newspapers, magazine covers and even fake autopsy reports and crime scene photos serve as testament to Anderson’s commitment to injecting authenticity into his fictional universes.

As a filmmaker, Anderson was preoccupied with the idea of stories within stories, as seen with the multiple framing devices in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Asteroid City. At its heart, the exhibition is a tribute to storytelling, and it embodies this through its thoughtful choices when it comes to the visitor experience, creating the impression of stories nested within stories and allowing us to inhabit and lose ourselves in Anderson’s unique, carefully crafted worlds. 

Shehrazade Zafar-Arif
Photo: Matt Alexander/PA Media Assignments

Wes Anderson: The Archives is at the Design Museum from 21^st November 2025 until 26^th July 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.

Guests were served a selection of canapes, including some delightfully fluffy mini cod cakes and savoury beetroot cannolis, followed by a four-course tasting menu and wine pairing that echoed the Italian influences of Cadogan’s Lake Como-inspired Stanza collection. The artist, known for her figurative paintings exploring literature and the still moments of life, displayed The Writer’s Nest – a wistful work born of memories and longing for drinking wine and reading. 

To start, attendees were treated to a rich San Marzano Tomato and Fior di Latte tart, intricately topped with an Old Winchester cheese (think pecorino) crisp. Succulent Capa Santa Scallops, accompanied by a light but punchy fennel salad, concluded the first half of the meal. Then came a powerful Wild Mushroom and Wood Pigeon Risotto, before the infinitely oozy Baba au Limoncello with mascarpone cream for dessert.

Each course was carefully described to the room of women, and universally affectionately committed to Cadogan’s centring of wine in both her art and life (the artist connects with her girlfriends once a month to “drink wine and chat”). A silky 2023 Villa Bucci, Verdicchio Classico Superiore, served with the scallops, gently pulled out the acidity from the white onion purée, and the 2019 Ceretto Barbera d’Alba Piano subtly mellowed the intensity of the risotto.  This evening, she announced, was about exploring the “taste and imagery of how we celebrate friendship”. And it did. 

Writer, author and wine expert Helen McGinn continues the Ladies who Lead series on the 20^th November.  

Hattie Birchinall

The Ladies Who Lead series is on from 16^th October until 20^th November 2025 at The Pem, Conrad London St James, 22-28 Broadway, London SW1H 0BH. For further information or to book, visit here.

Even by the artist’s standards, an explosive feast of colour is on display. A parallel could potentially be drawn with late Matisse paper cut-outs in terms of sheer joy of pigment. Both men share the same tremendous creative vigour that belies their autumnal years. The majority of these works have been created over the last six months by Hockney in his London studio. Over the course of that period, he has been experimenting with “reverse perspective”, which in essence brings together multiple viewpoints into the two-dimensional plane of the canvas. A film at the entrance of Annely Juda addresses the concept through the artist’s analysis and reworkings of the likes of Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation (1440-1445) and Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689).

The opening room here offers a strong sense of the domestic. There are still lifes featuring brightly coloured chequered tablecloths laden with vivid fruit opposite remarkably vibrant canvases of tables and chairs, mostly in interiors. Three of these furniture works are set on a floor seemingly consisting of triangular fans of reds and orange hues that truly zing, particularly the blue chairs. In two, he has stuck photographs, presumably of views of his garden, into the compositions at choice junctures of the rooms’ walls, alongside the painted, vertically lined wallpaper to emphasise the perspective. Arguably, the painting that sears itself into your visual memory more than any other, however, is the acrylic Gauguin’s Chair and Vincent’s Chair, July 2025. It is as if he is summoning the souls of these one-time friends to patch up their differences over a pipe and a bottle of Bordeaux. The chairs, one purple, one yellow, sizzle with energy, their splayed legs testifying to his deployment of reverse perspective.

Recent portraits of friends and family from earlier this year are found in the following larger room, known as “the Ballroom”. Depicted among others are the gallerist John Kasmin and his wife Jane, and the artist’s frequently baseball-hatted great-nephew Richard Hockney. A quirky new painting set within an oval, Richard Watching Me Paint This Seated on a Chair with Big Wheels, September 2025, does exactly what it says on the tin. Hockney seems to find some humour in his predicament. Another work, The Conversation, July 2025, featuring three images of his great-nephew head down texting, a mirror reflecting him doing just that and another portrait of the younger man standing with hands in pockets, device firmly away. It strikes an original tone and one unquestionably set in the present.

Flowers continue to be a subject of fascination for Hockey. The recent painting, Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025, has at its centre a spectacular bouquet the artist received on his 88^th birthday in July. One also finds the modern master challenging traditional Western rules of perspective again in Three Vases on a Table, Inside, August 2025. The blue and white chequered table is opened out like an accordion, the vases of flowers apparently out of all proportion with the Lilliputian chairs in the foreground.

Upstairs, one encounters “The Moon Room”, an area devoted to a series of mostly iPad works Hockney made from the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 to September 2023. Based in the grounds of the idyllic Normandy residence where he lived at the time, the octogenarian is seen using his device to capture the luminous orb in the night sky as it glows above the darkly silhouetted trees, casting moody shadows. One, entitled 5^th December 2020, depicts a lone Christmas tree in Hockney’s garden in France. It stands colourfully illuminated against the darkened night sky, topped with a suitably festive white star. On the right, closer to the viewer, appears the side of the artist’s then home decorated in baubles. Maybe a touch of defiance can be read into that singular Yuletide tree. Hockney’s curiosity and investigatory nature that feeds his constant search for composition are very much to the fore. These innovative, ever-experimental works are a life-affirming delight.

James White
Photo: Installation view of David Hockney, Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, Annely Juda Fine Art, 7^th November 2025 – 28^th February 2026, All artworks © David Hockney

David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings is at Annely Juda Fine Art from 7^th November 2025 until 28^th February 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.

As a young man, Quiñones was one of the stars of the seminal 1982 hip hop culture film, Wild Style. Although not featured in the current show, the fictional movie captures something of the Puerto Rican-American’s real-life subversive spirit. Playing a semi-biographical graffiti artist going by the name of Zorro, Quiñones is seen evading police arrest whilst painting a subway car in New York. Another scene alludes to how the art world made overtures towards him with a view to his exhibiting in more traditional settings. Viewers find “Zorro” first resisting his companions’ shift to commissioned murals, fearing a loss of integrity, before deciding to embrace the new artistic opportunities. Quiñones has long since adopted a more all-encompassing outlook, shaking up the art world’s lapels to establish street art as a form worthy of international recognition. The exciting, raw intensity of the artist’s creativity saw his remarkable rise to prominence at a young age, his work being chosen for New York’s groundbreaking White Columns exhibition in 1980 and New York/New Wave at MoMA PS1 in 1981. He even appeared, naturally spray can in hand, in Blondie’s pop video for their hit single, Rapture (1981).

Using the medium of graffiti to deliver social critique, the artist had put himself in the spotlight with his 1979 double-car mural Stop the Bomb, a call for an end to aggressive Cold War rhetoric at a time of heightened tensions with the Soviet Union. That same year, he brought his spray-painting mastery, alongside Fab 5 Freddy, to his first formal exhibition at Galleria La Medusa in Rome. Lee, a work created on canvas for this significant Italian show, featuring Quiñones’s first name in his inimitable lettering, has survived the test of time to appear on Woodbury House’s walls. In 1978, the pioneering New Yorker had arguably planted the seed for the global street art movement by transforming a neighbourhood handball court into a giant colourific mural. “Howard the Duck”, the undeniable star of that creation is revived by the artist here in London in the form of an archival pigment print from 2014.

Over the years, this influential figure in the graffiti movement has clearly lost none of his appetite for raising societal issues. Money and more specifically the dollar: the very core of the American dream and promoter of avarice rolled into one, is a recurring theme in recent works here. American Splendor from this year is a large, mixed media painting on poly-cotton canvas depicting a gigantic man bestride the Empire State building. Resembling a monstrously overgrown “Finance Bro”, the figure reaches out rather desperately for encircling paper planes that turn out to be actual dollar bills. Instantly recalling the classic 1933 film, King Kong, made at the height of the Great Depression, one is reminded that the pursuit of monetary gain, shaping so much of human civilisation, is both exhausting and unfulfilling. Elsewhere, one finds Quiñones commenting on how money holds us all in a form of captivity. In Money Can’t Buy Love (2010), a naked woman curls herself into a tight ball within a shopping trolley holding her head, the image rendered on top of a real birchwood crate. The artist has stuck fragments of dollar bills to the structure, which seem to hound the stricken figure as she faces the endless need to make money whilst realising financial success is not always accompanied by love or contentment. 

As someone who immigrated to the United States himself in early life, Quiñones is found here casting an informed judgmental eye on America’s treatment of marginalised communities. One emotive work, Red Dawn (2021), depicts Red Cloud, the leader of the Native American Lakota people, superimposed on top of a white and grey background, the constituent shapes of which allude to the Stars and Stripes. In reference to European settlers’ betrayal of land acquisition agreements, the words “Get off my Dawn” are written across the centre, a twist on “Get off my Lawn”. Quiñones, of Native American descent himself, reveals sympathy for the suffering of his ancestors whilst engaging in the sort of wordplay that has long been a feature of his work. In another memorable work nearby, No Strings Attached (2021), Chuck D of Public Enemy fame appears as a puppet cut from his strings, conjuring up ideas of displacement and manipulation.

Quiñones’s mobilisation of language is constantly in evidence at Woodbury House. After the New Yorker had become part of the East Village art scene in the early 1980s, a visit by the major art dealer Mary Boone would spur him to reshape his practice. Noticing Quiñones’s studio walls were covered by his written comments, Boone expressed an interest in exhibiting them in her gallery. Subsequently, the artist started cutting up fragments of these walls inscribed with text and paint marks. Some of these “tablet works”, as he calls them, feature in the current exhibition. Tablet #25 (2005) pulls no punches with its handwritten phrase: “There are those that have a rich history in taking from the poor.” Other works like Tablet #9 (2005) reveal the artist’s scorn for the dissemination of misinformation he sees in the USA today, alongside what he views to be a stark decline in political leadership.

In this time of conflicting socio-political narratives within the US, Quiñones’s sheer frustration is borne out in the floor-based installation, Heart in a Hurricane (2009-2025). Featuring a self-portrait of the artist clutching a giant painted rose alongside a real, rather damaged Stars and Stripes flag, it finds him viewing his nation to be in a state of crisis with no clarity of leadership, in his words: “a ship with a wheel but no rudder.” Once again, this pioneering figure is using his artistic voice to bring into sharp relief the social and civil unrest of the present era. In a career spanning half a century, Lee Quiñones has played a pivotal role in ensuring a blurring of the boundaries between street and gallery art. The former resident of New York’s Lower East Side, who painted around 125 subway cars over ten years together with the Fabulous Five Crew, now has artwork in the permanent collections of some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including MoMA and the Whitney Museum of Art. Outside Is America at Woodbury House represents a long overdue opportunity for a British audience to see at first hand the still markedly socially-political work of this icon of street art, who has long since evolved into an internationally acclaimed painter.

James White
Photo: Courtesy of Woodbury House

Outside Is America by Lee Quiñones is at Woodbury House from 16^th October until 28^th November 2025. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), for whom a full membership of the RA  would rather surprisingly remain elusive, is best known for his mastery of “chiaroscuro”, the dramatic light and shade technique pioneered by Caravaggio. Whereas the Italian’s skills were harnessed as a battering ram for the Counter Reformation, the Englishman painted scenes of scientific learning whilst drawing too on themes such as morality and the sublime in nature. Wright was versed in Edmund Burke’s exploration of the grandeur of the Universe in the Anglo-Irish philosopher’s treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). The artist’s scientific and industrial subjects on display at the National Gallery were greatly inspired by his friendships with key figures within the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group of industrialists, philosophers and scientists from the Midlands who gathered to discuss new ideas.  Numbered among them were the physician Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather and a patron of Wright of Derby, Washington Shirley, 5^th Earl Ferrers.

Arguably, it is the presence in the National Gallery of two of the artist’s most celebrated works which promise to set visitors’ pulses racing. Each reveals Wright’s remarkable expertise with an exaggerated form of chiaroscuro called tenebrism, which uses more extreme contrasts where darkness dominates, frequently deploying a spotlight effect. An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) has beguiled visitors to the National Gallery since it was acquired by the Trafalgar Square institution in 1863. In a room illuminated mainly by a single candle, a central lecturer demonstrates the effects of a vacuum in a glass chamber on a white cockatoo before a group of onlookers. Our eyes are drawn to two dramatically lit sisters in the centre. One seems on the verge of bursting into tears, her hands seeking the comfort of her elder sister, who hides her own face, apparently unable to witness the bird’s plight. An older man, perhaps their father, urges the two girls to turn and pay attention to the life and death scenario unfolding before their eyes, whilst another gentleman in the foreground coolly observes proceedings. He represents the Enlightenment ideal of detached, highly rational masculinity. The artist marks his allegiance to the Lunar Society by painting a full moon visible through a window on the right. Intriguingly, the National Gallery has managed to lay its hands on an original air pump from the time that somehow carries a more sinister threat in reality.

The equally monumental work, A Philosopher giving that lecture on an Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun (1766), once again finds Wright showing off his uncanny ability to conjure up artificial illumination. One of several Derby Museum loanees, the work sees the depiction of another scientific demonstration performed by candlelight. As with the celebrated Air Pump work displayed alongside, a heroically locked lecturer holds an attentive audience in rapture. He is explaining the movements of the solar system by means of a clockwork model of the heavens known as an Orrery. Suitably, the wealthy family of onlookers are positioned as a circular group to echo the object of their fascination. Earl Ferrers, who was to purchase the painting, has been identified on the far right. Once agai,n efforts have been made to include an actual example of the 18^th-century apparatus depicted, on loan like the Air Pump from the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge.

Curators of the current exhibition are proposing that Joseph Wright needs to be reevaluated as not only a painter of light but also an exploiter of the dramatic potential of nighttime settings. Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765) is one of several other atmospheric paintings here that prove equally vivid. Wright depicts himself alongside his friends, the cartographer Peter Perez Burdett and John Wilson, in deep contemplation of the aesthetic qualities of an antique sculpture. In An Academy by Lamplight (1769), earnest young men draw from the classical marble, “Nymph with a Shell.” The Nocturnes that follow are no less arresting as the painter uses light cutting through darkness to define figures, objects and spaces. One idiosyncratic image to the modern eye, Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent (1773), reveals a man shovelling earth beside the Derbyshire river in a night scene gloriously illuminated by a lantern and glowing moon. The mysterious digger, it transpires, is blocking a fox den to ensure the following day’s hunt goes entirely to plan. In A Philosopher by Lamplight (circa 1769), an old hermit sits examining a human skeleton in a cave lit up by a solitary candle and a moon bringing a blue tinge to the clouds overhead. As he appears to contemplate the meaning of life, two intrepid young visitors dressed as pilgrims approach him, notable for their comparatively diminutive size. Surely Wright is drawing on how science was increasingly being used in 18^th-century Europe to rationally understand nature.

The white heat of the Industrial Revolution is literally brought to bear in A Blacksmith’s Shop (1771). The artist once more uses his mastery of light and shadow to energise this night scene, the craftsmen glowing before their own handiwork. 

A wall of Mezzotint prints at the end of the exhibition testifies to how Wright of Derby brought his work to the wider public, both home and abroad, by collaborating with talented engravers like William Pether (1739-1821). Mezzotint would seem highly appropriate in conveying Wright’s nuances of light and dark. Curators also put forward the proposition that a youthful Wright might have been inspired to create his candlelight paintings in later life when enjoying the theatrical miniature worlds offered by fashionable Peepshow, Toy Theatres. True to form here, a charming surviving example from 1721 is displayed to support that theory. Nearby, a comparison is drawn between the experience of “peering into a magic lantern” and contemplating one of the artist’s candlelight compositions, a figurine on show depicting children bewitched by the optical device. This enjoyable exploration of Joseph Wright of Derby’s artistic practice adds weight to his reputation as an artist fully engaged with the scientific and philosophical questions of the Enlightenment. And that consummate mastery of tenebrism is truly a sight to behold.

James White
Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun, exhibited 1766 © Derby Museums

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows is at the National Gallery from 7^th November 2025 until 10^th May 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.

Banksy Limitless, in South Kensington, presents a mix of informal settings and museum space. The aforementioned black area, which can be encountered midway through the experience, on the right, offers Abandon Hope, as simple and unadorned as its original Shoreditch Bridge placement, and on the left, a multisensorial immersion into Devolved Parliament. In the same room, pieces from the Crude Oil series – Horse Guard, I fought the law and I won, Sunflowers from Petrol Station and UFO  – are hanging in neat frames. Around the corner, a small corridor hosts, among coloured lights and fake plants, 2024’s The Zoo. The tweaks to the environment are carefully curated and serve the morphing series of topics. There is a route to follow, but then each section is free to explore, with graffiti that both blends in and stands out from its physical surroundings.

Starting at level minus one, a long sequence of boards traces the first appearance and circulation of Banksy’s work, from Bristol to Dismaland, the US parades and the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem. In front of them, a heavy curtain hides benches and a medium-sized screen where clips are projected, showcasing some behind-the-scenes and spectators’ reactions to selected unveilings and openings of the faceless activist’s new ideas. The astounded expressions at the 2018 Sotheby’s auction when Girl with a Balloon turned into Love is in the Bin (sold a few years later for over £18 million) can be watched both in this room and down the corridor, where the Self Shredding Mechanism is taken apart and exposed in its entirety.

The displays do not follow a chronological order, but rather a loosely thematic one. The beginning is the earliest and most disruptive, touching on the profane works. Quite a lot of the most seen stencilled paintings here: Bomb Hugger, Laugh Now, and Stop and Search. Then, it moves to the political stances: half a room brings in rubble for the setting of the 2022 graffiti among the war-damaged buildings in Ukraine. As for Very Little Helps, many tags explain not only the material and meanings of the subjects represented, but also the numbers of original prints circulating, or the process to get (rightfully or not) the graffiti off the streets and indoors, as happened for No Ball Games.

Moving upstairs, Prankadilly Circus is a take on a Banksiesque London tube platform, dominated by the satirical view of the modern world and its push to homogenise people, particularly finding the best expression in the Soup Can, a changing-in-colour series recalling Warhol’s notorious Campbell’s Soup Cans.

Moving away from the background rattling noise of railtracks, another pristine white area opens up, this time, though, with tall 3D elements hanging from the ceiling, like the Girl with a Balloon against a transparent London Eye. This is the British section, the close-up on everything bearing the Union Jack, UK-specific stories, and the love/hate relationship of Banksy with his home country. It takes the forms of posters of the collaboration with the Bristol Museum and Borderline Offensive for Glastonbury 2024; sculpture Phone Booth; the 2010 Time Out London cover; and the Banksy Bristol T-shirt, distributed in 2021 in a few independent shops in support of the Colston Four. This latter is accompanied by a video with news bulletins and testimonies about the event: this recurring combination of the piece and its effect grounds the item in a context, often highlighting how it is the relationship with the audience (how the public reacts to the release of each item) that defines the impact of the piece, not just the piece itself. And that’s at the core of Banksy’s production, given the short-lived nature of the means with which he expresses himself. That same makeshift but impactful approach is taken on by the South Kensington exhibition, while displaying one of the most comprehensive collections of his work to date.

Cristiana Ferrauti
Photo: Courtesy of Banksy Limitless

Banksy Limitless is at Sussex Mansions from 15^th September 2025. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.

An interesting space is the David Bowie Centre: this is an archive for the 90,000 items the artist left to the V&A since the museum’s successful exhibition David Bowie Is… (2013-2018). Inside the Centre, one room has been arranged for public access (restricted to ticket holders; reservations are free, but with limited regular releases) and showcases roughly 200 items (rotating) out of the whole collection. One of the walls is covered with cabinets and drawers that we are told contain books and photographic material. The centre follows the same rules of the rest of the storehouse: no labels or lengthy descriptions on the journey the curators organised for the museum’s guests, rather vague thematic displays packed with objects whose story can be complemented with the books or digital guides available.

While footage of music videos and live performances of the Thin White Duke runs on loop on a vertical screen, visitors can admire some of the most iconic costumes, such as the blue suit for The Life on Mars and the Alexander McQueen Union Jack frock worn for the Earthling album cover. There are then synthesisers and keyboards, numerous handwritten notes of Bowie about his movie script and ideas for a musical, lyrics amended and tidied up scores of famous hits, a letter of reference from his father and a thank you note from Lady Gaga, photos of the songwriter first immersions in soul and jungle, and modern testaments of the legacy he left for local communities and in the music and cinematic world. Stripped of the conventional exhibition’s set-up, with exact lighting, isolated elements, or lengthy captions, the arrangement of these items delivers a sense of intimacy, making the man behind Ziggy Stardust closer to the viewer, a familiar character, talented with creativity.

Those looking for a deep dive into the story or expecting a neat showcase of top-selected objects may be a bit puzzled. As for the rest of the Storehouse, the offering is of a different type. The V&A East is a cool opportunity for a sneak peek behind the scenes of how a museum warehouse is organised and the rich amount of treasures (beyond what’s currently on display) they preserve.

An appealing service is the Order an Object: via appointment, anyone can order items from the online catalogue, for free, to handle in person in the study rooms.

Cristiana Ferrauti
Image: Courtesy of David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse

David Bowie Centre is at the V&A East Storehouse. For further information, visit the exhibition’s website here.

Thiebaud, who died in 2021 at the age of 101, is best known for his vibrantly painted still-lives of classically American subjects from shop cakes to pinball machines. Here at the Courtauld, one finds the crucial period that saw the transition into the artist’s signature style, from the late 50s to the mid 60s. First working as an illustrator, cartoonist and commercial art director, he only really took up painting as a fine artist after becoming a teacher at the University of California, Davis. In 1956, Thiebaud travelled to New York from his home city of Sacramento, California, to meet key members of the avant-garde. The celebrated Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning, offered him career-transforming advice, urging his fellow painter to find his own individual voice and subjects. Those words of wisdom are seen at the Courtauld to, in time, bear fruit. Meat Counter (1956-59) sure enough finds Thiebaud turning his attention to an everyday display of food in a shop – such a subject would be a mainstay of his career – but the brushstrokes seem to represent an unconvincing attempt at abstract expressionist loose mark making. Similarly, Pinball machine (1956) hints at a creator rather stylistically out of sync, the paint muddied and lacking in clarity.

By the early 60s, Thiebaud had arrived at the approach that was destined to be inimitably his own, the rendering of lushly painted commonplace objects of American life set in front of spare backgrounds. A case in point can be seen in Penny Machines (1961) with the tightly composed forms of the sweet dispensers constructed in thickly brushed paint. Then, in 1962, he had a major breakthrough, having persuaded the New York art dealer Allan Stone to take him on the previous year. Three exhibitions in 1962, the first a sold-out solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, the other two where he featured alongside the little-known Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Those last two firmly established Pop Art. Despite his subject matter frequently alluding to American mass production and consumption, Theibaud’s rich painterly surfaces were always far removed from the cool cynicism and flat detachment of Pop Art.

From this point on, the Sacramento-based artist is found really exploiting the physical qualities of paint. Not for nothing did the British critic Lawrence Alloway dub Thiebaud “the laureate of lunch counters”.  Glorious evocations of American post-war abundance like Pie Rows (1961) are bursting with vibrant colour and harmoniously balanced compositionally.  Undoubtedly, Thiebaud’s previous professional calling as an art director responsible for lighting and window displays at the Rexall Drug Company shaped his aesthetic traits. One of the artist’s most celebrated works during the early 1960s, Cakes (1963), has been allowed out of the US for the first time by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Thiebaud focuses on the cakes’ exuberant decoration, emphasising their seductiveness by depicting them life-size. And yet, there is something disconcerting about the manner in which they are displayed precariously on tiny spindles – like catwalk models tottering on vertiginous heels.

The artist was unswerving in his belief that everyday American consumer objects were suitable for depiction in contemporary art. Four Pinball Machines (1962) ostensibly appears to be merely a straight depiction of an arcade of the machines. However, close inspection reveals Thiebaud reconfiguring their square backglasses to imitate Frank Stella’s squares, Kenneth Noland’s target and Elsworth Kelly’s grids. It’s a clarion call for popular culture to be brought into the arena of contemporary art. The painter saw his work as continuing the legacy of still life pioneers.  He shares Morandi’s love of forms and Cézanne’s ability to utilise geometric fundamentals: the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. At times here, certain works recall the melancholia of a Jean-Siméon Chardin still life, an example being the isolated Caged Pie (1962). A sense of melancholy also pervades the empty trays in Delicatessan Counter (1963).

Thiebaud’s artistic coming of age in the 60s also saw him create a portfolio of 17 prints in 1964 entitled Delights. In an accompanying exhibition to American Still Life, these words are currently on view in the Courtauld Gallery’s Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery. Here, he reengages with the still life imagery of the paintings he produced earlier in the decade, demonstrating his abilities as a draughtsman and printmaker. It is intriguing to find Thiebaud rendering those motifs of Americana, previously so lusciously painted, on a smaller scale and mostly in black and white. The visitor gains insight into the artist’s building of form via his mastery of cross-hatching and diagonal lines to capture light and shadow.

The Courtauld Gallery is providing an all too rare opportunity on these shores to enjoy the exciting, often salivation-inducing still lifes of one of America’s most important artists of the second half of the 20^th century. Belying their simple appearance and steeped in nostalgia, Thieboud’s captivating paintings and prints of quintessential American subjects from the boom years of post-war prosperity are found recasting the genre of still life for the modern era.

James White
Photos:

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life is at the Courtauld Gallery from 10^th October 2025 until 18^th January 2026. For further information or to book visit the exhibition’s website here.