Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

Sunlight in the Blue Room (1891) by the Danish painter Anna Ancher is a luminous celebration of light, color, and quiet domestic life—hallmarks of her artistic voice within the Skagen painters’ community. Though many of her contemporaries focused on dramatic seascapes and the rugged lives of fishermen, Ancher turned inward, revealing the spiritual and emotional richness of the everyday interior. In this work, she transforms an ordinary room into a radiant study of sunlight and chromatic harmony. The painting depicts a young woman seated at a table in a modest blue room. The figure is turned away from the viewer, encouraging an intimate yet observational distance. The true protagonist of the scene is not the woman, but the sunlight itself, which streams through a window and floods the room with warm illumination. The golden light interacts dynamically with the cool blue walls, creating a compelling contrast that reveals Ancher’s mastery of color theory. Rather than relying on sharp detail, she uses soft brushstrokes and delicate transitions of tone to suggest texture and atmosphere. The composition’s simplicity heightens its quiet emotional resonance. The space feels contemplative, almost sacred, capturing a moment suspended in time. In the absence of narrative drama, the viewer is invited to reflect on the serenity of solitude and the beauty found in ordinary surroundings. With Sunlight in the Blue Room, Ancher redefines what is worthy of artistic attention, revealing domestic space as a site of profound aesthetic and spiritual experience. Through light, she transforms the everyday into the extraordinary.

A seasonally spooky artwork: 'Spider' (1967) by Leonora Carrington is a surreal and symbolic work that reflects the late British-Mexican artist’s fascination with mythology, transformation, and the feminine psyche. The spider, a recurring motif in Carrington’s art and writing, represents both creation and entrapment - a paradox central to her vision of womanhood and artistic identity. In this piece, the spider can be seen as a self-portrait of the artist herself: weaving intricate webs that connect dreams, memory, and myth. Carrington, associated with the Surrealist movement, often used fantastical imagery to challenge patriarchal structures and rational thought. The spider’s web becomes a metaphor for storytelling and for the interconnectedness of all living things. Through its delicate yet powerful threads, Carrington suggests that creativity and chaos are inseparable forces. The spider embodies patience, wisdom, and the mystical power of the feminine - a figure that spins her own universe from within. Ultimately, Spider reveals Carrington’s belief in the transformative potential of imagination, where art becomes a web that binds spirit and matter, the real and the magical, into one continuous act of creation.

Paris Design Week is a citywide design festival taking place from September 4 to 13, 2025, showcasing the very best of global design in exhibitions, events, talks and installations across more than 375 venues. The French capital will become a hub for designers, architects and the public to come together and be inspired by innovation and ideas from around the world. Paris Design Week is timed to coincide with the Maison&Objet September trade show, aimed at stimulating growth in the design and craft sector. Among The Wick’s favourite pieces this year is an example of craft meetings contemporary design and art from Guatemala, Designs by Hand. This dazzling display at 84 Rue de Turenne is arranged across a series of captivating capsules, taking cues from the Guatemalan Great Jaguar – the iconic 7th century CE pyramid that is a symbol of Mayan architecture, culture and spirituality. The display promises to bring the “spirit of Guatemala” to Paris with designers and artisans showcasing heritage Mayan craftsmanship techniques with a contemporary vision, reimagining traditional, organic materials such as wood, clay and volcanic stone. A compelling exhibit that demonstrates how cultural identity is preserved through design – as the collective put it: “an ode to ancestral beauty and contemporary vision.”

26 August marks the birthday of the remarkable, revolutionary American art collector, patron and socialite, Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim. Born on 26 August 1898 to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who died on the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim described herself as an “art addict” and over her career carved a path that was distinctively her own in the world of collecting and avant-garde art. She first travelled to Europe in 1921 and opened her gallery in London in 1938. By 1942 she had returned to New York to establish her museum-gallery there. She would later return to Europe and acquire a building on Venice’s Grand Canal, which now houses part of her collection today. She was lifelong friends of countless era defining artists and intellects, including Marcel DuChamp, Jean Cocteau and Samuel Beckett – who encouraged Guggenheim to treat contemporary art as a “living thing” which forever shaped her vision and approach. There she introduced her collection of Cubist, abstract art from Europe to New York via her gallery, helping to launch the movement in the US, and showed artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, then little known. Art was never only a business for Guggenheim who cared deeply about art and the artists she worked with. As she put it in her own words: “I dedicated myself to my collection. A collection means hard work. It was what I wanted to do and I made it my life’s work. I am not an art collector. I am a museum.”

The Herbet Freehills Kramer Portrait Award is a painting competition celebrating the very best artists working in the genre today. An exhibition of forty-six shortlisted artists is on show at a free exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery until 12 October, 2025. Among the broad, rich and fascinating approaches to portraiture exhibited is Inset Day, 2025, a painting by Yvadney Davis. Davis is an award-winning Black British contemporary portrait artist from South London, whose work has been described as “a love letter to the Windrush Generation of her grandparents and its descendants, combining soulful brush strokes and defiant colour with iconic design elements of the 'West Indian front room'.” In this oil and acrylic portrait of the artist and her daughter on canvas we see the living room motif and the domestic space used to convey another facet to daily life and its quiet politics. The stylishly dressed Yvadney (she knack for good clothing and patterns, having studied Fashion Design at Central St Martins before becoming a painter) gazes wearily at the viewer, while her daughter leaps joyously on the sofa behind her. The image is a highly relatable picture of parenthood – played out in the tension between the mother’s composure and the child’s play. It’s a simple but perfect conjuring of the juggle of parenthood when school is closed – all the more resonant during the long days of summer.

Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece represents a landmark moment in the history of painting. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte remains Seurat’s largest and most celebrated painting, completed in 1884 and depicting people of varying social milieu as they partake in a post prandial stroll in a park west of Paris, on the island of La Grande Jatte. The subject was modern, but at the same time timeless – the idea of leisure, free and available to all, a universal human pleasure. Seurat made the painting using the pointillism, a technique that emerged from a scientific hypothesis whereby points of pure colour are positioned closely to create an illusion of blurring into a single form. The dots were created with small, horizontal brushstrokes and give the painting its unique, scintillating texture and warmth. The painting capture the quintessence of life in the summertime – and a is a reminder to slow down, and smell the proverbial roses at this time of year. Since 1926, the painting has been held in the collection of the The Art Institute of Chicago.

In Arab culture, the term ‘tiger’s eye’ refers to a woman’s defiant and rebellious gaze – a woman who does not conform or abide by the rules set out by society. In her mixed-media photo-based project of the same name, Egyptian-born artist Heba Khalifa reclaims the term, and the female gaze, to empower and to heal from childhood trauma. In the project, which unfolds in different techniques such as photomontage, Khalifa revisits her childhood home through the family photo album, reconstructing and constructing painful and difficult memories from her past. Through the project, Khalifa also begins to heal from this trauma, accepting it as part of her and rebuilding her image. The evocative, moving collage image Wild belongs to this latter phase, where the artist begins to see herself again – a symbolic act of acceptance and reparation. The beautiful Tiger’s Eye is deeply personal and private journey but one that speaks widely to domestic violence and abuse suffered by women all over the world, and art’s potential role in healing. Khalifa is one of seven artists selected for the 2025 Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award 2025, presented in an exhibition at Espace Monoprix curated by César González-Aguirre until October, 2025.

The late French-Moroccan artist and photographer Leila Alaoui was celebrated for her portraits of people whose lives were impacted gravely by conflict and unrest across the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle Eastern regions. Alaoui regularly collaborated with NGOs, and used her social documentary photography to bring attention and awareness to urgent humanitarian issues. A graduate of City University, New York, by 2009, Alaoui had exhibited her work internationally including the Institut du Monde Arabe and at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Konsthall of Malmoe in Sweden, the national palace of the citadel of Cascais in Portugal, and Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, Canada. Her photographic missions for NGOs included the Danish Refugee Council, Search for Common Ground and HCR. In January 2016, while working on an Amnesty International commission about women’s rights in Burkina Faso, Leila Alaoui was seriously injured in the terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou. Tragically, she did not recover, and died three days later on 18 January 2016 of a heart attack, aged 33. The Fondation Leila Alaoui was later established in her memory, working as an estate for her work, and a way to continue to inspire and support artists advocating for human rights and human dignity.

No Pasara was Alaoui’s first major body of work, and constitutes a significant part of her legacy as an artist. Commissioned by the EU, No Pasara (meaning Entry Denied), followed a group of young Moroccans awaiting the journey to Europe from the port cities of Nador and Tangier. As a French-Moroccan, this story was particularly close to Alaoui’s heart and the portraits with their subtle touches of beauty and the sublime carve out a space for hope and optimism in a grim reality for these young people. In this picture, the composition, with the figure of the young man in the corner of the frame against an illusory painted backdrop of a mountainous landscape, fills the image with desire, and a dream. It exemplifies the captivating, stirring and empathetic kind of storytelling Alaoui quickly became known for in her short but inspiring career.

This month marks an important moment for the Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu as she becomes the first living artist to present a solo exhibition at the opulent Galleria Borghese, Rome taking over the entire 17th century villa and gardens with a solo exhibition titled Black Soil Poems, supported by FENDI. The gallery’s famous collection of art and its architecture have been transformed into a platform for Mutu’s site-specific sculptures, installations and moving image works, suspended to inhabit the space in ethereal and phantasmagical ways. Mutu is celebrated for her sculptures and installations exploring race, gender, colonialism and environmental issues and this show is equally charged with those themes and tensions. The title of the show evokes the duality of Mutu’s work, rooted in ancient ideas but utterly connected to the current social and material context. Black soil refers to the rich matter found in many places, including the Secret Gardens of Galleria Borghese. The show extends to the American Academy in Rome, where this work can be found: Shavasana I. The reclining bronze figure, covered by a woven straw mat, takes its name from the yoga pose “shavasana” (corpse pose) and is inspired by a real-life incident. Situated in the Academy’s beautiful atrium, surrounded by ancient Roman funerary inscriptions, it evokes universal themes of death and surrender. The exhibition runs in Rome to 14 September, 2025.