UK EXHIBITION OUTLOOK FOR JULY 2025 AND BEYOND…
Martin Holman
All views expressed in these previews are the author’s and not those of Newlyn School of Art
AUBREY LEVINTHAL: MIRROR MATTER
INGLEBY. 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh EH3 6NX
28 June - 13 September 2025
Aubrey Levinthal, Sink Stomach, 2025, oil on panel, 103.9 x 78.4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Ingleby.
Painter Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986) lives and works in Philadelphia. Using thin washes of colour on wood panels, Levinthal explores the passage of time and interiority, often portraying herself and her loved ones in tender, introspective moments. Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and Milton Avery come to mind. Her works use a palette of light greens, yellows, ochres, pastels, as well as darker colours. There also is a physical imbalance in many of her compositions that gives her images an abiding feeling of melancholy and dislocation. We know that loneliness is increasingly becoming a widespread factor of life in developed societies, in which daily existence is dissociated from communal activities, where we seem to live to work rather than prioritise life’s more intimate, tender experiences.
THE POWER OF DRAWING: Marking 25 Years of the Royal Drawing School
ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL, 19-22 Charlotte Rd, London EC2A 3SG
1 -26 July 2025
Drawing acquired an enhanced status in the fifteenth century. Italy was the centre of this development; in the midst of general intellectual ferment, drawing became an extension of the artists’ creative process and a manifestation of their inventive power. It helped artists to devise accurate perspectival views and to perfect their ability in imitating human and natural forms.
The Royal Drawing School was founded in 2000 by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) and artist Catherine Goodman to encourage the traditional practice of drawing, pretty much as conceived by Renaissance artists. This show highlights the central role that drawing continues to have, seen through the work of some leading figures in contemporary art, from illustrator Quentin Blake to filmmaker Tim Burton, Cornwall-based painter Denzil Forrester, architect Norman Foster, engineer-artist Thomas Heatherwick, and artists like David Hockney, Chantal Joffe (currently showing The Exchange, Penzance), Bharti Kher (recently seen at Tate St Ives), Cornelia Parker and Tracey Emin. King Charles has also contributed a new work on paper.
DRAWING ROOM INVITES… Anna Paterson, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Amba Sayal-Bennett
DRAWING ROOM at Tannery Arts Unit 1b, New Tannery Way 58 Grange Road Bermondsey London, SE1 5WS
15 May – 27 July 2025
Installation view of Drawing Room Invites... © BJDeakin Photography
The Drawing Room began life in 2000 as a venue for exhibitions that took an open and experimental view of drawing as a fine art practice. It has a different atmosphere to the Royal School. Whereas the Royal School is traditional and figurative, the Drawing Room is experimental and, for the sake of argument, ‘abstract’. So, the two institutions occupy opposite ends of the spectrum that represents the perception that artists today have of drawing. That spectrum is wide, as the Drawing Room’s activities in the past 25 years have shown. It can encompass film, sound, digital media and movement just as methods can extend to the roping in the elements as instruments, such as wind and heat from the sun. This show demonstrates how three artists in their 30s are exploring the medium from technical and imaginative perspectives. These include using computers and three-dimensions.
LINGER
EXETER PHOENIX, Gandy Street, Exeter EX4 3LS
5 July – 30 August 2025
Danny Rolph, Large Stargate, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 in. Image © the artist.
This is an interesting prospect - a show bringing together artists from Iceland and England. Apart from the Sagas and Scandi Noir, Iceland’s culture is not well known in the UK. This show will help to rectify that state of affairs. It brings together experienced practitioners who include Royal Academician Vanessa Jackson and one of London’s most intrepid painters of geometric abstraction, Danny Rolph.
We can expect large scale paintings, articulated pictorial space and an invitation to do what the exhibition title suggests, to linger. I am looking forward to seeing work by London-based Yorkshireman, Joel Tomlin. A painter turned sculptor, he works with wood, copper, tin and bronze often scavenged from the River Thames. His sculptures suggest archaeology - objects uncovered whose origins and purpose are out of our immediate grasp. Mythical and personal in feel, they derive a particular resonance from their obvious handmade quality. The other artists are Anna Hrund Másdóttir, Birgir Snæbjörn Birgisson, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, Joel Tomlin, Kristinn Már Pálmason and Peter Lamb.
HAROLD OFFEH: THE MOTHERSHIP COLLECTIVE 2.0
BALTIC CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA
5 July 2025 - 1 February 2026
and…
HAROLD OFFEH: MMM GOTTA TRY A LITTLE HARDER, IT COULD BE SWEET
KETTLE'S YARD, University of Cambridge, Castle Street, Cambridge CB3 0AQ
15 November 2025 – 1 March 2026
Harold Offeh produces performance-based videos that deal with race and identity. He often adopts the lens of representations of race and identity in film, song and art. Born in Accra, he grew up in London, so there is inevitably the perspective of his own experiences. Historical narratives and contemporary culture are equally up for examination – and humour is, thankfully, one of the routes Offeh follows.
The exhibition at Kettle’s Yard is the first major solo exhibition of Offeh’s work in a UK institution, and will bring together a selection of works from the artist’s career. At the Baltic, The Mothership Collective 2.0 is described as ‘a platform for play, gathering, curiosity, imaginative making and thinking’. It has been devised for communities, adults, children, young people and families. Its theme is sci-fi and the ambience will be centred on play. The artist’s interest in video comes from his research into pioneers of video: Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci, William Wegman, Bruce Nauman and Martha Rosler. Unimpeachable sources.
EMMA TALBOT: HOW WE LEARN TO LOVE
COMPTON VERNEY, Warwick CV35 9HZ
5 Jul-5 Oct 2025
Installation view, Compton Verney. Photo credit, Erik Saeter Jorgensen
"I draw to see what I am thinking"
– Emma Talbot
Sculpture, painting, animation, drawing and large-scale paintings on silk come together in the broad embrace of Talbot’s practice. Storytelling is an important element, and it extends to three-dimensional textile works and animation that have, in the past, accompanied intricate drawings, all carried out on a large scale. The work encloses the visitor, and the effect is like stepping into another person’s imagination. This artist’s imagination is fully on show with big themes redolent of our times - sustainability, death and rebirth, and human resilience. The only way to find out how she handles this universe of subject matter is by seeing her work for yourself.
SEEDS OF SURREALISM: WOMEN OF MONSIEUR OZENFANT’S ACADEMY
RICHARD SALTOUN, 41 Dover Street, London W1S 4NS
8 July - 23 August 2025
Ozenfant’s Academy in London, late 1930s. Photograph by Ernő Goldfinger
Amédée Ozenfant, Still Life, Dishes, 1920, oil on canvas, 72 x 59.5 cm. © The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
French artist Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) was the co-inventor of the art movement known as Purism, a highly aesthetic form of Cubism which stresses simple, often geometric form. The inessential, like decoration, is eliminated, and colour’s role was to modify form. Purism was mostly expressed in painting but since Ozenfant’s collaborator was the architect Le Corbusier, its themes are found in architecture, too. And, actually, ‘architectural’ best describes the paintings in this style. It is high Modernism pre- WW2, and was formulated in 1917 in response to the chaotic reality of the Great War. Its well-ordered foundations were reason and stability.
Would it work in England, where modern French culture was pretty rare? From 1935 to 1938 Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) operated the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Art in London, also teaching at London’s French Institute. Leonora Carrington was one of its students; Henry Moore taught there; Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi both cited its creator as the reason they had become artists. With war looming, Ozenfant moved the operation to New York
EMILY KAM KNGWARRAY
TATE MODERN, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
10 Jul 2025-11 Jan 2026
Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anwerlarr, 1990, acrylic on canvas. © Estate of Emily Kam Kngwarray/DACS 2024. Photograph: National Gallery of Australia
One of the most important of Australia’s Aboriginal painters of the twentieth century, Emily Kam Kngwarray is unique among Indigenous Australian painters for her prolific and innovative style, matched with a distinctive sense of colour. She worked in literal and figurative isolation from the western artists of her epoch and died in 1996 aged 82. In the late 1970s, following being introduced to batik and tie-dye, she began expressing herself through visual art. She continued by using acrylic on canvas in the late 80s. This show premiered last year at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and follows a story of development that Europeans will have little conception of: sand stories (finger markings in the sand) and ‘painting up’’ (ochres mixed with emu fat) on breasts, chests and upper arms during women’s ceremonies, to the huge, mural-sized canvases like Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), painted in a single day in 1995.
PASSING STRANGE: BRITISH LAND ART THROUGH TIME
HENRY MOORE INSTITUTE, 74 The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AH
18 Jul-2 Nov 2025
www.henry-moore.org/henry-moore-institute
Andy Goldsworthy, Penpont Sycamore 1989, 1989, leaves, Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery). Purchased through the Henry Moore Foundation with the aid of a grant from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, 1991. © Andy Goldsworthy. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photo: Norman Taylor.
Land Art, sometimes called Earthworks, refers to work derived from the earth or situated within a landscape that are usually site specific. The heyday was the latter half of the 1960s when American and European artists used soil, rocks, sand as media and subject matter. It was supremely non-commercial (at least, at the start) and could encompass walking, as in the approach taken by Richard Long, an example of which used to exist at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens. Long walked a line into the ground, a visible path.
Predominantly conceptual and ephemeral, hand-made and organic, Land Art in the UK included photographic documentation of actions and an exploration of locality and a keen awareness of rural traditions and contexts. The long-established term ‘landscape’, the epitome of English painting from the 18th century, was re-thought by these artists, from being seen as something old-fashioned and redundant to the arena of radical artistic experiment.
MILLET: LIFE ON THE LAND
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
7 August - 19 October 2025
Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, c. 1857–1859, oil on canvas, 55.5 × 66 cm (21.9 x 26 in), Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Jean-François Millet (1814-75) is hardly contemporary, but the great French painter of rural life remains one of the major figures of the 19th century, whose work greatly informed the direction of art in the next century. Van Gogh recognised himself in Millet's life and work: a simple man proud of his rural roots. So Vincent painted peasant life, just like Millet, and pictorial expressionism is the beneficiary.
Millet preferred to depict the life of labour rather than paint plein-air landscapes like other artists of the Barbizon School. He elevated farm labourers to a higher status in art by depicting them on a scale conventionally reserved for historical, biblical and mythological subjects. Many critics saw him as leftist, as they also regarded Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet in a time of social unrest in France. The February Revolution of 1848 did away with the monarchy and that was followed by the bloody but unsuccessful June Uprising in Paris by working-class people who saw their newly elected government becoming increasingly conservative. Millet, however, insisted his interests bore no relation to the politics of the time. The land was his focus, but how to distinguish between depictions of honest toil and implications of the immense inequality in people’s lives? Millet inspired Impressionists and Post-Impressionist artists Degas, and Camille Pissarro, a lifelong anarchist whose political beliefs profoundly influenced his art.
HOWARD HODGKIN: IN A PUBLIC GARDEN
PITZHANGER MANOR & GALLERY, Ealing Green, London W5 5EQ
1 October 2025 - 22 February 2026
Howard Hodgkin, Nick, 1977. Soft-ground etching with sugar lift and aquatint with hand-colouring in watercolour on Crisbrook hand-made paper Image: 44.5 x 56 cm. Edition of 100 Image: © The Estate of Howard Hodgkin
“My prints are the result of thinking about what prints can be. The last thing I want them to be is substitute paintings.”
- Howard Hodgkin
Pitzhanger Manor is not well known as an arts venue, but that is changing. It was built as a country retreat in the once-rural Ealing by one of Britain’s most influential architects, Sir John Soane (1753-1837). The fine building housed his own eclectic art collection. Set within landscaped parkland, it was a place where he could entertain clients and friends. He also had his own lake to fish in.
Soane did not stay long, moving back to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London with his collection - creating one of the capital’s most distinctive museums. Meanwhile Pitzhanger changed hands until the local council took it on in 1900. A public library until 1984, the gallery was established but did not really flourish until a few years ago. Following a £12M conservation project, it reopened in 2019.
Returned to the glory of Soane’s original designs, Pitzhanger has staged an impressive programme of contemporary art shows, giving West London residents and visitors the venue it has always lacked. Including Howard Hodgkin makes complete sense and this show is described as ‘the largest institutional exhibition of original prints by the acclaimed British artist to date.’ Expect immersion in the late artist’s preoccupation with colour, memory, gesture, and the halfway world between abstraction and nuance and feeling for recognisable forms and interiors.
BETTY PARSONS
DE LA WARR PAVILION, Bexhill-On-Sea, TN40 1DP
4 Oct-25 Jan 2025
Betty Parsons, Circles, 1967, Acrylic on canvas, 117 x 239 x 6 cm, 46 x 94 1/8 x 2 3/8 in, framed. Courtesy Alison Jacques, and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © The Betty Parsons Foundation. Photo: Michael Brzezinski
“When I’m not at the gallery, my own art is my relaxation. That’s my greatest joy.”
- Betty Parsons
Once referred to as ‘the den mother of Abstract Expressionism’, Betty Parsons (1900-82) was an early advocate of the great US painters Pollock, Rothko, Reinhardt, Still and Newman. Her midtown gallery in New York opened in 1946 and she began to show these titans long before they all achieved notoriety. Every summer, Parsons closed the gallery so that she could make her own art, but she never exhibited her own work – although her famous contemporaries urged her to do so. She knew the world wasn’t friendly towards female artists. So, she made her bold, bright, colourful abstraction in private, as a hobby.
Constellations, organic shapes and bursts of bright lines, which occasionally suggest places and forms, recur in her images. So do bold colours: hyper-saturated pink, bold blues, burnt orange. She was one of the pioneers of the found object, using driftwood to make colourful formal arrangements that can be considered both painting and sculpture. “I was born with a love of the unfamiliar,” Parsons once said. “When I see something I can’t relate to I’m fascinated.” Audiences are now becoming more and more curious about Parsons as an artist. Parsons the art dealer securely belongs to modern art history; now it’s time for the painter to shine forth. Seeing the show means visiting the De La Warr Pavilion, possibly the greatest Modernist building in England.
ROBERT MACBRYDE AND ROBERT COLQUHOUN: ARTISTS, LOVERS, OUTSIDERS
CHARLESTON, Firle, Lewes, East Sussex BN8 6LL
22 October 2025 - 8 March 2026
“The Two Roberts” (Robert MacBryde on the left and Robert Colquhoun) photographed by Felix Man. © Getty Images
Freud, Bacon, Sutherland – these are famous names in British painting from mid-century. Colquhoun and MacBryde? Those names tend not to ring a bell, and that is surprising. During the 1940s they achieved notable success, with Colquhoun in particular considered one of the leading artists of his day. So how did they come to be so obscure just 20 years later?
Colquhoun and MacBryde first met at Glasgow School of Art in 1933. They were working class Scots who left school at 15. Meeting on the first day of term, they quickly became inseparable: they are invariably still spoken about as a pair: ‘the Two Roberts’.
Their stars rose after they moved to London in WW2 and worked together on theatre set designs, an activity they continued into the 50s. As painters they became part of the bohemian culture of Fitzrovia, meeting in pubs with fellow artists engaged in war work, such as Prunella Clough. The Roberts’ shared a house with John Minton and later with Polish emigré painter Jankel Adler. A fascinating figure in his own right, Adler was strongly influenced by Picasso and Léger, and brought knowledge of their work with him to London. That influence is apparent in the work of this bohemian group, and they continued to paint their angst-ridden, stylised still-lifes and portraits while other artists moved into abstraction. Then came Pop art and the Roberts’ reputation was eclipsed, out of fashion. The effort to restore their position has been going on for 15 years or more. Here’s a further attempt, and one day the penny will drop in the minds of the people who decide these things: this Scottish duo were good, very good.
ENCOUNTERS: GIACOMETTI
Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, London EC2Y 8DS
8 May 2025 — 24 May 2026
With Mona Hatoum
3 September 2025 - 11 January 2026
With Lynda Benglis
5 February - 24 May 2026
Photographs courtesy Barbican Art Gallery, City of London.
“Working from life, I ended up creating tiny three-centimeter sculptures. I did it despite myself. I couldn’t understand it. I started big and ended minuscule. Only the minuscule struck me as a resemblance [to the model]. I understood it later: a person is not seen as a whole until one draws away and the person becomes tiny.”
- Alberto Giacometti
This is an interesting project - putting three leading women artists alongside examples of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. The Fondation Giacometti has lent some of the Swiss master’s purest figures, including Four Women on a Base, cast in bronze in 1950 of four extremely thin and elongated standing women seen from a certain distance. The figures show off his post-war, post-Holocaust focus on the space of representation. The year-long series started with an exhibition of works by Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha, whose hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, depict the strangeness and vulnerability of the contemporary figure. Next will be Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026. Their artworks resonate with and respond to Giacometti’s sculptures, opening up new intergenerational dialogues through the timeless themes of death, fragmentation, the domestic, memory, trauma, the erotic, horror and humour.