Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

As Frida Kahlo’s birthday approaches and Tate Modern’s Frida: The Making of an Icon brings her back into renewed focus, The Wick is looking to El sueño (La cama), a 1940 self-portrait that makes sleep one of the Mexican art icon’s most potent subjects. Kahlo lies in a wooden bed floating among clouds, wrapped in a bright yellow blanket threaded with green vines. Above her on the canopy, a skeleton reclines with flowers and dynamite, close enough to make the scene seem domestic yet strange enough to render it otherworldly.

Kahlo’s beds were not merely places of rest. Childhood polio and the 1925 bus accident that left her with lifelong injuries meant long periods of confinement, and recovery and bed-bound work, with a mirror and easel eventually turning her bed into a studio of its own. In El sueño, this intimate space becomes a kind of private theatre. The body sleeps below while death keeps watch above, decorated like a calaca from Mexican popular culture, a familiar presence rather than a distant horror. The vines curl across the blanket like signs of tethering and entanglement, but also of growth, giving the image an air of simultaneous unease and tenderness.

Often linked to Surrealism, Kahlo pushed back against the label, saying she painted her own reality, not dreams. This is evident in the composition: it might look dreamlike at first, but it is undeniably grounded in lived experience. Pain, sleep, ritual, love and mortality are all held together with an unsettling calm. Painted in the year Kahlo remarried Diego Rivera, El sueño captures turbulence and tension with remarkable stillness. As Tate’s new exhibition considers how Kahlo became an icon, the painting shows how her work continues to pierce through the mythology that surrounds her. Beneath the flowers and famous face is an artist who made her own reality impossible to look away from.

With Royal Ascot in full stride, this week The Wick is taking a closer look at Dancing Fearless, Jorg Karg’s arresting 2020 photographic collage of a black horse rearing within a sparse studio scene. A pale curtain hangs behind it, translucent steps rise from a sweep of crumpled fabric and a single dark sphere rests in the foreground. The horse is in motion, yet the composition suspends it in a strange pause, giving the image its thick sense of tension. The grandeur of equestrian portraiture is drawn into Karg’s carefully imagined world, where the improvised set and surreal arrangement lend the scene an uncanny and dreamlike quality.

Karg has worked with digital collage for more than a decade, building his images from photographs he takes himself and material created in collaboration with photographers around the world. His process involves rearranging and abstracting these images, a practice shaped by the years he previously spent painting and drawing. Dancing Fearless belongs to a body of work created after more than a year of studio experimentation, during which he took thousands of photographs and worked with clay, wire, wood and found objects. During a week devoted to racing and polished appearances, Dancing Fearless captures the horse at the height of its power, poised between movement and stillness and completely in command of the frame.

Petals and pixels.

Ahead of multi-media artist Gordon Cheung’s forthcoming survey Many Worlds, One Mind at CLOSE Gallery in Somerset, this week The Wick is taking a closer look at Jan van Huysum I (New Order), a 2014 work that draws Dutch still life into the logic of the digital age. For his New Order series, Cheung works from high-resolution Rijksmuseum photographs of seventeenth-century flower paintings, often featuring tulips, and runs them through an algorithm that rearranges their pixels, rendering the image lush and legible, but only just. Jan van Huysum’s world of abundance begins to fray, turning a genre long associated with beauty, wealth and mortality into a contemporary image of fragility and volatility. In Cheung’s hands, still life becomes a way of thinking about material excess, the fragility of life and the uneasy sense that history, however dressed up in new technologies, keeps circling back on itself. This tension runs through his wider practice. Raised in London by Hong Kong-born parents, Cheung’s work moves between Eastern and Western traditions, art history and digital process, bringing them together in works that question the systems shaping markets, beliefs and memory. The work also offers a compelling way into his exhibition, which brings together 28 works across sculpture, painting, print and etching at CLOSE Gallery from 6 June to 15 August 2026.

On International Jazz Day, we are taking a closer look at Denzil Forrester’s Dub, a 1985 painting that captures music as something felt collectively as much as heard. Shaped by Forrester’s experience of London dub culture in the 1980s, the work draws on the all-night sessions he attended and sketched. Bodies blur across a compressed, vibrant interior, while the DJ and speaker stack anchor the scene at its edge. Rather than simply depicting a single venue, Forrester paints the sensation of being inside it: the heat, the rhythm, the press of the crowd, the energy flowing between people in the room. This sense of exchange gives Dub a connection to jazz as well, through the two genres' shared emphasis on playfulness, spontaneity and community. The painting also stands as an important record of Black British social life in the 1980s, preserving a culture of joy, creativity and collective gathering too often overlooked in art history.

In celebration of Peter Doig’s 67th birthday week, we are taking a closer look at Alpinist, a 2023 work that brings together many of the qualities that have made the artist one of the most distinctive painters of his generation. The painting turns the language of the ski poster into something stranger, depicting a lone skier in harlequin checks edging across an icy ledge, red skis strapped in a cross on his back, while the Matterhorn rises over a deep white valley behind him. But despite being shaped by the imagery that informed Doig’s time in Zermatt, the scene is far from a straightforward Alpine idyll. The mountain is split between sunlight and shadow, the figure is vivid but solitary, and the whole composition carries the subtle tension that gives so much of Doig’s work its charge. Made after a painting created between 2019 and 2022, Alpinist reflects the artist’s ability to transform lived places into images suspended between memory and imagination, turning a winter landscape into something elusive and faintly haunting.

There are self-portraits that flatter, and then there are the ones that fight back. Sarah Lucas’s Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs belongs firmly to the second camp. Made in 1996 as part of her wider cycle of 1990s self-portraits, the work shows Lucas sprawled in an armchair in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, meeting the viewer with a stare that is knowing and completely unbothered. The image feels insolent in the best way possible. The fried eggs placed over her chest are, on one level, a visual gag. But beneath the humour and crudeness, the eggs turn the female body into a caricature, pushing the absurdity of sexual cliché until it becomes accusatory. Lucas presents femininity as something performed, projected and consumed, then sabotages the whole mechanism with a single deadpan image. The tension between masculine and feminine codes, parody and self-possession, swagger and vulnerability, runs through Lucas’s work. Born in London and emerging from the Goldsmiths generation in the early 1990s, she built a practice out of tabloid culture, bodily metaphor and the rough poetry of everyday materials. In Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, all of this condenses into one distinct composition. Even the discarded cigarettes in the corner work to suggest recklessness, while Lucas remains fully in control of the scene. What makes the picture endure is its refusal to resolve neatly. Lucas stages herself inside the very codes she is dismantling, turning the image into both parody and challenge. Nearly three decades on, it still feels as pointed and confrontational as ever.

Following the 98th Academy Awards ceremony that took place earlier this week, we take a closer look at the history of the Oscar statuette, officially known as the Academy Award of Merit, one of the most famous sculptures in popular culture and an international icon of the film industry. The sculpture was created in 1928 by the American artist George Stanley, based on a design concept by Cedric Gibbons, an art director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was designed for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to serve as the trophy for achievements in filmmaking. George Stanley transformed Gibbons’s sketch into a three-dimensional sculpture. The design shows a knight standing upright while holding a crusader’s sword. The knight stands on top of a film reel with five spokes. These spokes represent the five original branches of the Academy: actors, directors, producers, writers, and technicians. Stanley’s sculpture combines classical artistic style with modern symbolism connected to the film industry. The Oscar statuette is about 13.5 inches (34 cm) tall and weighs approximately 8.5 pounds (3.9 kg). Today it is made from bronze and plated with 24-karat gold, giving it its distinctive golden appearance. The smooth surface, balanced posture, and simple but powerful design reflect Stanley’s skill as a sculptor and his ability to create a timeless symbol. The first Oscar awards ceremony took place in 1929, and since then the statuette has become one of the most recognisable awards in the world. Each year, winners receive this sculpture as a sign of excellence in cinema. George Stanley’s work has therefore become a lasting icon of achievement in the global film industry and a symbol of artistic and creative success.

In celebration of Frank Bowling’s birthday – the artist turns 92 today – we are taking a closer look at the artist’s 2014 painting, Dawning. It exemplifies the artist’s long-standing exploration of colour, materiality and migration. Created during a later phase of his career, the painting demonstrates Bowling’s commitment to abstraction as a space for memory and sensation rather than direct representation. Dawning is characterised by luminous washes of colour that appear to bleed and pool across the canvas. Bowling often pours, stains and layers acrylic gel and pigment, allowing gravity and chance to shape the surface. In this work, light seems to emerge from within the painting itself: warm tones diffuse into cooler hues, evoking the transitional moment suggested by the title—the threshold between night and day. Although abstract, the painting carries subtle geographical and emotional resonances. Throughout his career, Bowling has referenced maps of Guyana and the transatlantic crossings that shaped his own migration from Guyana to Britain and later the United States. In Dawning, the sense of emergence can be read metaphorically, suggesting renewal, displacement or the continual becoming of identity. The textured surface, built up through accumulations of gel and pigment, gives the painting a sculptural presence. Light catches the ridges and drips, reinforcing the idea of time embedded in matter. Dawning thus embodies Bowling’s belief that abstraction can hold personal and political histories, transforming colour into a vessel for memory and change. Dawning will be shown by Marc Selwyn Fine Art, booth D1 at Frieze LA opening from today.

A Valentine’s special edition: Edvard Munch’s The Kiss is among the most haunting and poignant meditation on love, intimacy, and the loss of self in art history, yet it is a less celebrated work in the Norwegian artist’s oeuvre. Painted in several versions between the 1890s and early 1900s, the work shows a couple locked in an embrace inside a dimly lit room. Their faces merge into a single, indistinct form, blurring the boundary between two individuals. Rather than presenting romantic love as purely tender or joyful, Munch frames it as something intense, consuming, and faintly unsettling. The setting plays a crucial role in shaping this mood. The dark interior contrasts with the faint light from the window behind the couple, isolating them from the outside world. This enclosed space suggests secrecy and withdrawal, as if love requires turning away from society. The heavy shadows and muted color palette heighten the sense of emotional weight, reinforcing the idea that intimacy is both comforting and dangerous. Munch’s treatment of the figures is especially striking. Their bodies are simplified, and their merged faces become almost mask-like, erasing clear identity. This visual fusion can be read as a symbol of emotional unity, but it also hints at a loss of individuality. Love, in Munch’s vision, threatens to dissolve the self, an idea that reflects his broader anxieties about human relationships. The Kiss belongs to Munch’s larger exploration of love, anxiety, and death, themes that recur throughout his work – including in his most famous work, The Scream. Rather than idealizing romance, he exposes its psychological complexity. The painting invites viewers to reflect on intimacy as a powerful force—one that promises connection while simultaneously risking annihilation of the individual.