Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

As Gagosian opens This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte in London, The Wick is taking a closer look at The Son of Man, René Magritte’s 1964 self-portrait and one of the most recognisable images in Surrealism. A man in a dark overcoat and bowler hat stands before a low wall, with the sea and a cloudy sky stretching behind him. A green apple hovers directly in front of his face, leaving only the edges of his eyes visible. A closer look and another oddity emerges: his left arm appears to bend backwards. Though the ingredients appear ordinary at first glance, their arrangement makes the image strange and unsettling.

The painting began with a request from Magritte’s friend and patron Harry Torczyner for a portrait of the artist. Magritte wrestled with the commission before arriving at a characteristically elusive solution: a self-portrait in which his own face is almost entirely hidden. The green apple only makes us more curious about what sits behind it, playing into Magritte’s fascination with the things we can see and what remains just slightly, but very frustratingly nontheless, out of reach. The bowler-hatted figure was already a recurring presence in his work and echoed Magritte’s own deliberately conventional way of dressing. The apple, another familiar motif, transforms the scene with a single surreal interruption.

Over sixty years later, The Son of Man has escaped far beyond the history of Surrealism into film, advertising and popular culture. Its long afterlife sits neatly alongside Gagosian’s new exhibition, which brings Magritte’s work together with more than forty artists across generations to consider how his visual ideas continue to circulate. A floating apple, a hidden face and a man in a bowler hat still have the power to make the familiar strange.

Nearly a thousand years after it was stitched, the Bayeux Tapestry has finally returned to England.

Opening at the British Museum on 10 September, this historic loan marks the first time the work has been shown in the UK since it was made. Stretching almost 70 metres, the medieval masterpiece traces the events leading to the Norman Conquest of 1066, following Harold Godwinson’s journey to Normandy and his dealings with William, Duke of Normandy, through to Harold’s coronation and the Battle of Hastings. Long before cinema or the endless scroll, history was already being told, image by image.

Its famous name is slightly misleading. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidery, made from dyed wool stitched onto linen. Most scholars believe it was produced in England, likely in or around Canterbury, and likely worked by English embroiderers, while Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, is widely thought to have commissioned it. Though its imagery draws on the visual language of illuminated manuscripts, its storytelling is remarkably lively: ships push across the Channel, horses surge into battle and Halley’s Comet appears above a newly crowned Harold. The embroidery also preserves glimpses of 11th-century clothing, architecture and everyday life, alongside fantastical creatures that populate its borders.

For modern eyes now accustomed to comics and scrolling through stories on a screen, the Tapestry’s visual language can seem surprisingly familiar. Its narrative unfolds continuously across the linen, using inscriptions, repeated figures and small details to carry the eye from one 'episode' to the next.

On view at the British Museum until 11 July 2027, its return offers a rare chance to encounter one of medieval art’s greatest survivors on the side of the Channel where it was probably made.

As International Beatleweek 2026 brings fans back to Liverpool, The Wick is taking a closer look at the 1967 album cover for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the most recognisable album sleeves ever made and a defining image of twentieth-century pop culture. Created by British Pop artist Peter Blake and American artist Jann Haworth, and photographed by Michael Cooper, the sleeve places the band in colour-drenched military-style costumes before a teeming crowd of faces, cut-outs, wax figures, flowers and painted props. At the centre, the bass drum announces the fictional band; below it, a flower bed spells out the name that would become instantly recognisable.

The cover carries the unmistakable spirit of Pop art, gathering celebrity, music, cinema, literature and everyday spectacle into the democratic square of an LP sleeve. Blake and Haworth turned the format into a stage set, with The Beatles simultaneously appearing as performers, collectors and fans. The image is joyful and strange in equal measure, a crowd scene where pop culture and fame is both subject and scenery.

Sgt. Pepper showed the world what an album could be, visually as well as musically. Its cover invited listeners to look as closely as they listened, searching the faces, decoding the references and treating the sleeve as an artwork in itself: to be studied and returned to. Nearly sixty years on, it still has the electric pull it had when the album first arrived on shelves. Before the first note is even heard, the image has already drawn you into the album's world.

With Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons now open at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, The Wick is looking to Woolworth’s Roses, a 2023 painting of a vase of flowers that reveals far more than first meets the eye. At first, the work appears to sit within the long tradition of floral still life. Look longer, and the roses begin to carry a wider history, drawn from the seven rose bushes George Orwell planted in his garden before the Second World War.

Woods, who was elected a Royal Academician in 2022, is a British painter known for paintings that hover between recognisable image and abstraction, with forms slipping through her distinctive wet-look oil paint. In Woolworth’s Roses, the flowers are gathered indoors, their petals drooping against a darker interior. The painting offers the pleasure of colour and surface, while also carrying the knowledge that bloom is always temporary. Like Orwell’s garden, the image becomes a small act of attention in a period shadowed by war and uncertainty.

The work sits naturally within Garden Without Seasons, an exhibition of 29 new and recent paintings, collages and prints made over the last four years, in which Woods returns to flowers, still life, windows and the natural world. Shown within Sir John Soane’s former country home, Woolworth’s Roses sharpens the exhibition’s meditation on the fragile life of flowers. The vase becomes an image of beauty held briefly, all the more luminous with the knowledge that it cannot last.

This summer, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum has opened As Seen Below, James Turrell’s vast new Skyspace and one of the most ambitious works yet by the American artist and master of light. Set inside a 40-metre-wide subterranean dome in Denmark, the work invites visitors to descend below ground and look upwards, through a circular opening cut into the ceiling, where the sky becomes part of the experience itself. Turrell has spent more than half a century working with light, space and perception, shaping environments that heighten our awareness of how we see. His Skyspaces are now found across the world and are among his most recognisable works: architectural chambers that frame the sky and transform it through carefully controlled light. As Seen Below marks Turrell’s 100th Skyspace and is the largest Skyspace created for a museum context. During the day, the dome opens to the sky, allowing weather and Nordic light to shift the experience in real time. In Colour Shift mode, the opening closes and the chamber is transformed by luminous fields of colour, making light seem almost physical. At sunrise and sunset, the work enters its most atmospheric state, as Turrell’s changing hues meet the natural light beyond the aperture. The space turns looking into an event, slowing time and making the familiar sky feel newly strange and fascinating.

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.