Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

The late Cecil Beaton started his now legendary career as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue. However, his decade working for Vogue came to an end in 1938, after he inserted an anti-semitic word into a photograph for a story on New York society. He was fired from Vogue, and returned to England. He spent the next years attempting to rebuild his reputation, working as a war photographer, and later took many portraits of the Royal family, including the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the birth of King Charles III.

Beaton today is also known for the portraits and fashion photographs he made in the 1960s and 1970s – many of them taken at, or using floral designs he created from his gardens at Ashcombe House and Reddish House – the 18th century manor Beaton transformed in the village of Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. A new exhibition at the Garden Museum explores Beaton’s ongoing fascination with horticulture in his life and work. The display includes this spectacular black and white portrait of Bianca Jagger taken in Beaton’s gardens at Reddish in 1978, wearing a sumptuous Zandra Rhodes lace dress. Jagger appears in several portraits by Beaton, a shoot that would become one of his most iconic, capturing the mood of an era while creating an image of timeless elegance and beauty that endures to today.

The much anticipated unveiling of the revamped Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery takes place this week, and Mud Sun is sure to be one of the highlights. The new commission by Sir Richard Long is a dazzling five-metre long flat circular sculpture, made on site by the acclaimed land artist by hand, using tidal mud from the River Avon, close to Long’s home in Bristol. It occupies a dramatic position at the top of the grand staircase in the transformed Sainsbury Wing, housing the most ambitious rehang of the National Gallery’s collection of early 13th century to High Renaissance paintings to date. Long is the only artist to have been nominated for the Turner Prize four times (he won in 1989) and is one of the country’s most celebrated sculptors, producing pioneering land art works with earth, rock, stone and mud. Mud Sun is typifies Long’s approach to art and the landscape, through simple physical actions, evoked in the work’s swirls and undulating patterns, reminders of human gestures and movements in nature.

As Digital Art Week returns to London (citywide, 21- 25 April), we are looking to the oeuvre Krista Kim, the trailblazing contemporary artist and pioneer of the Techism movement. A highlight of the 2024 Digital Art Week programme was a screening at Outernet of Kim’s Continuum, a mind-blowing visual meditation presented at an awe-inspiring scale (covering Outernet’s four-storey LED screen). Continuum is designed to uplift and bring serenity to the digital realm, where so often the dark sides of humanity prevail, or information can feel overwhelming. As Kim puts it: "Continuum" was born out of a profound desire to bridge this digital-human gap and to restore a sense of balance and connectedness. It was not just an artwork but a mission, an attempt to reintroduce Zen principles into our increasingly digitized existence.” Using an archive of LED light photography, Kim crafted digital compositions, prismatic, compelling colourscapes – nodding to the likes of Rothko and James Turrell – that invite introspective and sooth the senses. The project was originally conceived as a collaboration with Spanish digital artist, Efren Mur, with healing, high frequency music by Ligovskoï, and is inspired by the artist’s time living in Japan and her encounters with the principles of zen. Continuum has been presented in different locations, including Time Square and Fort York National Historic Site, and is a testament to Kim’s unique place in the digital art field, revealing the transformative potential of digital technology and its positive effects on people.

Over the past fifteen years, British artist Ed Atkins has become one of the UK’s most influential artists, through computer-generated videos and animations that repurpose technology in revealing and revelatory ways. Borrowing from a plethora of sources, Atkins work explores the contemporary state of being, and the collisions between reality and fantasy. This ink and gouache painting on board is one of a series of similar works, realistic depictions of pillows, bearing the traces of the absent human body. “My life and my work are inextricable. How do I convey the life-ness that made these works – my life-ness – through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations. I want it so the more you see, the richer, more complex, less authored, less gettable things become” Atkins has said. The work reveals a persistent concern in Atkins work, to explore his own body, anxiety and the threatened human body. The work is included in Atkins’ largest ever exhibition to date, currently on view at Tate Britain, running to August 25th, 2025.

As Mothering Sunday approaches in the UK, we look to the groundbreaking paintings of Scottish artist Caroline Walker, paying tribute to the everyday, unseen moments of care in early motherhood, rarely depicted with nuance in art. In her lustrous oil paintings of quiet domestic scenes, observed from a voyeuristic distance, her subjects seem unaware of being looked at as they labour. Night Feed I is an intimate scale oil on board depicts a new mother breastfeeding her baby at night in the soft glow of the street light. The mother’s gesture is both tender and evokes the intense physical fatigue of round-the-clock nursing a newborn. Walker often works from her own photographs, and her subjects are sometimes members of her own family – her sister-in-law features in this painting. There is a feeling of closeness and comfort, but also the isolation of the domestic space, another important element of Walker’s works. The painter has explained: “The subject of my paintings in its broadest sense is women’s experience, whether that is the imagined interior life of a glimpsed shop worker, a closely observed portrayal of my mother working in the family home, or women I’ve had the privilege of spending time with, in their place of work. From the anonymous to the highly personal, what links all these subjects is an investigation of an experience which is specifically female.” Walker opens a major exhibition, Mothering, at Hepworth Wakefield in May, exploring themes of motherhood and early years care.

This week marks London’s citywide celebration of design, the annual London Design Week at the Design Centre. An example of exceptional, forward-thinking design happening in the capital, Faber Futures is a research and development studio for biologically inspired materials, founded by trailblazing designer and former Monday Muse Natsai Audrey Chieza. When the studio was invited to participate in the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice, they created Museum of Symbiosis – an imaginary institution of the future for biotechnology. The project comprises a 1:100 scale site model made from bronze and mycelium, and a sonic installation to guide visitors through the stories of the museum’s compelling real-world collection of donated objects, from Maurizio Montalti’s 17th century microscope, a revolutionary tool for investigating life in detail, but also representing a colonial approach towards nature. Mushroom farmer and educator Chido Govera, meanwhile, revealed how indigenous knowledge can be reclaimed through revolutionary biotech. Told as a speculative science fiction, Museum of Symbiosis imagines a world that has used biotechnology for good, restructuring itself to a more harmonious and equitable exchange between humans and the rest of the living world.

British Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong created this flag - the Pan African Flag for The Relic Travellers’ Alliance - in 2017. The appliqué flag features 54 stars to represent Africa’s 54 nations. The colours too are symbolic: green, black and red each represent the land, the people, and their struggle, while gold looks to Africa's future prosperity and a new chapter for the continent. Achiampong originally conceived of the flag as part of a broader, ongoing body of work that includes performance, audio, a series of films and text. The flag was first flown from
the roof of Somerset House, where Achiampong’s former studio was located, and has since flown from historic landmarks across the UK. Made the year after Brexit, with rising feelings of Nationalism and anti-migration in the UK, the flag is an emblem of the possibility of solidarity and unity, inspired by the Africa Union’s Africa Passport programme, posited in 2016, the same year as Brexit. Achiampong’s flag remains ever more resonant today, in our divided times, a slip of brightly-coloured hope buffeted by the breeze.

A new monograph on Achiampong’s enthralling practice of the last decade, If It Don't Exist, Build It, is published by Tate and is available now.

As far as romance in art history goes, perhaps no one has captured love and intimacy like Gustav Klimt in his iconic 20th century masterpiece. Klimt created the sublime oil painting, which is layered luxuriantly with gold leaf, silver and platinum, giving it it’s unforgettable patina, between 1907 and 1908. The painting was originally exhibited as “the lovers”, and depicts a couple, their bodies locked together in an intimate embrace, the pinnacle of passion. Their elaborate robes are in line with the fashions of the day, influenced by Art Nouveau; the work is considered one of the finest examples of the Vienna Secession movement, Vienna’s version of Art Nouveau. It remains one of Klimt’s most celebrated works, and now hangs in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. As for the woman who inspired such ardent feelings in the artist? There are several theories as to who the woman is in the image – It is thought that Klimt and his companion Emilie Flöge modeled for the work, but there’s rife speculation too that the woman is in fact Austrian composer Alma Mahler, or another female model, Red Hilda, who resembles the female figures in other Klimt paintings. The mystery remains one of the painting’s potent secrets, making its private intimacy all the more compelling, over a century on.

Zhang Enli is known for painting the familiar yet overlooked, bringing a prolonged look through painting to things that might otherwise appear significant. The Chinese artist has painted everything from public toilets to ashtrays, items he is drawn to by instinct and finds poetry on. Rooted in figuration, these objects, fragments and moments are then magnified and transformed, inspired by the subject’s ‘essence’ rather than it's physical presence. This painting, Tree Planter (2023), a two-metre oil work on canvas, is an example of Enli’s attentiveness to the prosaic and the minutiae of life, his narrative titles subtly directing the viewer towards his inspiration. The painting also marks Enli’s shift towards gestural abstraction since 2019, moving deeper into the psychological space of portraiture.” In the beginning, I worked from objects to lines. These lines were specific, like electrical cables and iron wires. But once they were depicted, I found them hard to define. It’s not easy to separate the abstract and the figurative. This has led me to where I am today. In my mind, the abstract and the figurative are not separate. Their boundaries are blurred”, the artist has said.