Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

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.

Mickalene Thomas is one of contemporary art’s most recognisable and influential names. The 53 year-old American artist has been concerned with the empowerment and reclamation of the image of Black women, known for her large-scale, dazzling works, ranging from monunemtal paintings, collages and photographs to installations and films. Her work centres around her circle of family and friends but speaks to universal themes of love, beauty and acceptance. Those themes will be the focus of the artist’s first solo exhibition at a British public gallery, All About Love, which opens at the Hayward Gallery on February 11 and runs to May 5. While we wait for the exhibition to open, this 2007 Thomas work is playing on our mind. Typical of Thomas’ bold and unabashed reclamation of the image of African American women, this painting, using Thomas’ trademark materials of acrylic, enamel and rhinestone on wood, portrays a Black female figure reclining and resplendent. A play on the trope throughout the history of painting of portraits of passive, objectified white European women nudes painted by and for white European male viewers, Thomas creates a fabulous, luxuriant space for Black women to be seen and be at ease.

It’s an unlikely collaboration: the avant-garde Surrealist Salvador Dali was first invited to create a set of Christmas cards by American card manufacturer Hallmark in 1948. Dali, who had moved to the US in 1940 and had become a devout Catholic by then, didn’t have any issue producing commercial artwork – but that didn’t mean he would water down his radical ideas. His takes on the traditional festive Christian images of an angel, Madonna and Child and Three Wise Men proved too out there for Hallmark and never saw the light of day. This watercolour work was created ten years later, when Hallmark commissioned Dali again, this time to create a set of seven greeting cards for various celebrations. The Christmas tree which features a butterfly motif – found in all of the paintings he created for this series – an otherworldly symbol representing the soul. Yet despite Dali’s renown and fame, only three of the watercolours were produced as cards in the end. We think it’s time to bring them back.

Every year since 1974, Flowers Gallery has organised ‘Small is Beautiful’, an annual exhibition of – you guessed it – small works. This year, Flowers has invited more than 100 artists to present works no more than 7 x 9 inches. It’s the perfect place to discover the work of emerging and new talents from around the world, including Eugenie Vronskaya, a Russian-born artist who now divides her time between London and the Scottish Highlands. One of two works Vronskaya is showing at Flowers is Sweet Little Mystery 3, a jewel-like piece with vibrant colour evoking a rural landscape with intricate, expressive brushwork. Sweet Little Mystery 3 reflects Vronskaya’s persistent interest in the ethereal and dreamlike, inspired by the landscapes of the Highlights and their particular contours and shifting light and weather conditions. The swirling sky here promises both menace and relief; the light breaks through and sets everything aglow - capturing the awe inspired by nature’s sweet and mysterious ways. Small is Beautiful runs at Flowers Gallery to Cork Street until January 4th.

Bourgeois began making her now globally famed steel spider sculptures in the 1990s. Though she had experimented with various sculptures in wood and textile since the 1940s, the spiders marked an uncanny new territory for the French-American artist. The initial inspiration for the arachnid form came from the artist’s mother, a weaver who managed the family’s tapestry restoration business, who Bourgeois once described as “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider,” the artist said. The spider became a recurring motif in her work for years to come. The largest and most iconic of Bourgeois’ spider sculptures – created for the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000 – pays homage to her mother with the title Maman. Six bronze casts of the staggering 30ft sculpture were made.


This Spider is the first example Bourgeois made, on a smaller yet still oversized scale; the bronze and granite piece was made large enough to fill a room, its thin, spindly legs stretching over the floor to form a cage-like structure (another motif in Bourgeois’ work) that is both menacing and protective. In the body of this Spider is a large white egg. Bourgeois continued to be preoccupied with the spider as a symbol and personnage in her work until late in life. Rather than seeing spiders as ominous, Bourgeois created them with great affection and reverence. “The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”