Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

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.

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.”

Though the figures in Claudette Johnson’s paintings and drawings often inhabit uncomfortable, awkward and difficult poses, the larger-than-life scale gouache and pastel drawing, Reclining Figure, 2017, rests. Though even at apparent ease, her facial expression is etched with the implication of difficulty or hardship; rest hard won. The scale of the image vies with the figures pose, a demand for the private, quiet moment of solace to be recognised, acknowledged, allowed space in the public realm. This kind of tension is always ripe in Johnson’s works, portraits based on but not direct representations of Black sitters, predominantly women, that she has created since the 1980s.

Johnson was part of what was originally called Wolverhampton Young Black Artists, a loose knit group that became the BLK Art Group. Johnson joined Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, Donald Rodney, Dominic Dawes, and Wenda Leslie. Later, alongside Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce, they became part of the influential British Black Arts Movement. Johnson is currently shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2025, for her exhibition Presence, held at The Courtauld Gallery. Last week, she unveiled her mural at Brixton Underground Station, a commission for Art on the Underground. The bold triptych is titled Three Women, and is Johnson’s first public artwork. It is inspire by a drawing Johnson made in the mid 1980s, and references Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.

Peter Uka’s rich figurative paintings draw from his childhood memories of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of significant transformation, political upheaval and social change in the newly independent nation. His works often capture moments of quiet interaction or depict individuals looking directly at the viewer, creating a bridge between the present and the past. His signature nearly life-sized canvases, create a powerful – often joyful – dialogue between the Nigeria of Uka’s early childhood and today.

Hurvin Anderson, who selected Uka for Artist-to-Artist 2024, explained his choice: ‘When I first encountered Peter’s work I enjoyed being immersed in his depictions of Nigerian life. I find his storytelling is so powerful and the palette is deep and rich. I respect his devotion to colour and that he is free with it, never holding back. His work has a forthright confidence in centring the Black figure while the figures themselves are self-possessed, have swagger, even. I like the reclamation in this. The paintings are evocatively stylised snapshots of memory and reverberate with joy.’

Today, October 1st, marks the beginning of Black History Month – a thirty-one-day celebration to commemorate and celebrate the history and present of the African diaspora. The event in its current incarnation began in the US in 1970 and was first observed in the UK in 1987. The theme for Black History Month for 2024 is ‘reclaiming narratives’ underscoring the event’s commitment to correcting histories and shining a light on untold stories, to better represent and understand the contributions and complexities of Black heritage.

One of many celebratory events taking place this month includes Conversations, at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, bringing together work by more than fifty Black women and non-binary artists. Among them is Sumuyya Khader, an upcoming Liverpool-based painter and illustrator who produces bold, blocky graphic illustrations and printed works for protest posters and book covers, social enterprises, and artist-led groups, as well as minimalist paintings in acrylic, working in both figurative and abstract modes. This dipytch portrays two figures close up, seen from behind – a subtle gesture of reclamation as the subjects maintain their power in autonomy, their gaze turned away from the viewer.

Khader is also the founder of Granby Press, a community-based organisation focusing on printed matter and design, and is in the process of collecting an archive of black culture and history in the L8 area of Liverpool. Conversations opens on 19 October and runs to 9 March 2025.

“My work is driven by an investigation into physicality and how we interact with the physical world,” says the Brazilian artist, Juliana Cerqueira Leite. Leite’s large abstract forms have a compelling tactile quality, with organic curves and contoured surfaces, often vessel-like structures that have contained the artist’s body.

At Frieze Sculpture 2024, three works by Leite are presented by TJ Boulting gallery, drawn from the artist’s series Repetitive Movements that Make and Unmake the World. Each of the three sculptures – titled Shovel, Button and this work, Sand, refer to three repetitive, ordinary actions – digging a hole with a shovel, buttoning trousers, and sanding a wall. Leite translated these movements into drawings, then back into three dimensions, treating stainless steel bars like lines, bending them to mimic and evoke the movement of each action.

In the dynamic, spontaneous curves of Sand, now installed in the English Garden’s of Regent’s Park until 27 October, the viewer can follow the buoyant, vigorous, upward motion, imagining the effort of an arm labouring – a representation of a body, without a body, a reinvention of how we might think about bodies through sculpture, creating an index of human movements.