Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

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.

The British architect Sir John Soane was born on this day, 10 September 1753. Soane’s incredible legacy lives on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and of course, the Soane Museum – his former home and offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Currently on view at the Soane is a unique exhibition of works by British Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor, sculptural works made especially for the Soane, placed throughout the museum and its opulent historic collections of art and architectural relics.

Viktor’s works move seamlessly between centuries, drawing on images and techniques from a plurality of historical periods, cultures, and mythologies, from ancient Egypt to medieval illumination and indigenous Australian art. Her sculptures and paintings are crafted carefully with elemental materials, from bronze and ceramic to wood and silk – materials chosen for their universal and perennial appeal, employed by artists and artisans for centuries, as well as for their formal and tactile associations and resonances.


This work, Constellations VIII, uses one of Viktor’s signature materials – pure 24-carat gold, applied with obsidian acrylic paint and varnish onto a matt canvas, which emphasizes the dazzling allure of the gold. Viktor uses gilding to produce a stunning visual effect – but it also has a deeper significance, addressing ideas about the finite and the infinite, beauty and myth, and evoking deep-rooted sociopolitical ideas about value and labour, particularly to black bodies. Viktor’s Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings, continues at the Soane Museum to 19 January and entry is free.

3 September is Skyscraper Day – an unofficial day for celebrating feats of architectural endeavour and engineering genius around the world. Whether you think they’re eyesores or pillars of human achievement, there are more than 7,000 skyscrapers (loosely defined as buildings stretching over 490 feet in height and above) around the world today, with the tallest still being the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completed in 2010 and standing at a staggering 2,722 feet – more than half a mile – tall.

And for as long as skyscrapers have been built – since the building boom on the American East Coast in the 1880s – artists have been fascinated by them. From Marcel Duchamp to Georgia O’Keeffe, to Mies van der Rohe and Alfred Stieglitz, artists have paid homage to skyscrapers in all mediums, and all manners.

Perhaps the most famous work of art devoted to a skyscraper is Andy Warhol’s 1964 film, Empire. The film demands eight hours and five minutes of the viewer’s time, focusing singularly on New York’s most spectacular monument, the Empire State Building. More of a painting than a film Empire is a love letter to New York, to the city’s skyline, and to the sheer ambition of mankind; all things that Warhol closely identified with.

Women have been the persistent centre of British fashion photographer Miles Aldridge’s images for more than three decades. The visionary artist has trained his lens on a fantastical cast of women, dazzling in lucid colour. But behind the seemingly perfect surfaces, his subjects – with their ominous blank expressions – suggest something psychologically fraught and complicated.

A trademark of the uncanny atmosphere Aldridge’s images conjure is this image, Venus Etcetera (after Titian). Part of a series of works reworking ideas from Italian Renaissance painters into contemporary compositions, the highly stylised portrait features an elegant female subject, the height of glamour – but something is off. It’s all in the details that subvert the idyllic image of beauty as it unravels before our eyes: the spilled sugar cubes on the table, the crossword scrawled over in blue biro, the distant stare of the subject unaware of the steaming kettle that screeches out steam beside her and the split milk on the polished red countertop. We are plunged into the mysterious world of her unknown.

It’s exactly the sort of image that has made Aldrige, 59, such a prominent figure in the fashion photography world since the 1990s. Today, his photographs belong in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Fondation Carmignac, and the Nicola Erni Collection. He has shot for publications including Vogue, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Alridge’s work currently features in the Saatchi Gallery’s Beyond Fashion exhibition, on view until 8 September.

At The Wick this week we continue to shine a light on our favourite artists of South Asian hertiage as part of the celebrations for South Asian Heritage Month. Bindi Vora is a British artist and curator based in London. Her acclaimed work Mountain of Salt was published first as a book by Perimeter Editions in 2021, and more recently was presented as part of Peckham 24, with Vora’s work Unraveling, dealing with aspects of the artist’s Kenyan-Indian heritage.

The text-based collage works that make up the staggering collection that is Mountain of Salt were a way for Vora to begin to get to grips with an overwhelming mass of information – the thick and fast slew of news that comes at us from every angle – in order to make some sort of sense of the pandemic and post-Brexit era. “I, like many others, became acutely aware of the landscape in which we were living in, where everything felt amplified,” says Vora. “Clinging to the news for updates, statistics and curves … for me it highlighted the way words and speech have a physical presence, bearing upon us and carrying weight.”

Visual material, cribbed from personal and collective archives and found imagery, and text, taken from social media and news, press conferences and protest placards, rub against each other in almost 400 pieces, drawing connections between the personal and the political, carving out the possibilites in language and their power to prompt a sea-change. Ultimately, Mountain of Salt becomes a celebration, too – of resistance and resilience in the everyday, if you know where to look for it. Sometimes the simplest statements make the biggest impact: ‘I will try to do better’, one work boldly decries.

Award-winning artist Joy Gregory revealed a glorious new public artwork at Heathrow Terminal 4’s underground station this week, a commission for Transport for London.
A Taste of Home is inspired by more than 100 asylum seekers living in temporary accommodation near the airport who Gregory met during workshops she ran. It comprises 24 works, pairing ethereal prints of plants, seeds, herbs and spices, paired with poetry – quietly querying lines by the likes of Gaza-born Khaled Abdallah and 35-year-old British-Kenyan poet Warsan Shire. It is both a timely and timeless reflection on migration and movement, on ideas of departure and return, and of how we carry a sense of home with us.

Gregory, 64, won the 8th annual Freelands Award in 2023 – a retrospective of her work will be held at the Whitechapel Gallery next year as a result. Having trained in commercial photography in the 1980s, Gregory developed a conceptual photo-based practice that experiments with a variety of digital and analogue techniques and grapples with themes related to contemporary identity, difference and displacement. She is also the editor of Shining Lights, the first critical anthology to explore the groundbreaking work of Black women photographers in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Shining Lights was published earlier this year, to great critical acclaim.

Of A Taste of Home, Gregory has said: “Culture and art is something that unites us all; it’s something we can all get behind. I think it’s important that art is in a space like this and not gallery space, which is seen as hallowed and exclusive. Everybody off the street can come and have a look at this.”