Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

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.

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.