Our top picks of exhibitions together with cultural spaces and places, both online and in the real world.

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Viewing Celia Paul at Victoria Miro Gallery

The Wick Culture - Celia Paul, Painter at Home, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Painter at Home, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

The Wick Culture - Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

The Wick Culture - Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Painter at Home, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts

Victoria Miro Gallery
14 March – 17 April 2025

Celia Paul’s eighth solo exhibition at Victoria Miro opens this week, and later this month, an expansive new monograph on the artist will be published by MACK to coincide, celebrating five decades of Paul’s riveting, profound and stirring paintings of the complexities of life through people she cherishes. This show focuses on the inevitable passing of time, and Paul’s relationship to it, through painting.

There are new self-portraits, as well as a poignant portrait of her four sisters, as well as sumptuous new seascapes, and paintings of the artist’s Bloomsbury studio. Figures who appear at times are plucked from Paul’s past as she reflects on the years, on what has changed – and what hasn’t – what can be captured in paint, and what slips away.

Shifting in atmosphere, many of the paintings are imbued with a certain kind of melancholy and feeling of solitude, and inevitably grief, as the artist looks at her world and considers the death of her husband, in 2021, and her own ageing. In her forthcoming monograph, which includes new essays by Hilton Als, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Edmund de Waal, among others, the artist writes: ‘My young self and I – we are the same person. I can stretch out my old hand – with its age spots – and hold my young unblemished hand.’

Viewing Colour at Tristan Hoare

The Wick Culture - Leila Bartell, Colour, Tristan Hoare. Image courtesy of Tristan Hoare Gallery.

Above Leila Bartell, Colour, Tristan Hoare. Image courtesy of Tristan Hoare Gallery.

The Wick Culture - Colour, Tristan Hoare. Image courtesy of Tristan Hoare Gallery.

Above Colour, Tristan Hoare. Image courtesy of Tristan Hoare Gallery.

Above Leila Bartell, Colour, Tristan Hoare. Image courtesy of Tristan Hoare Gallery.

Above Colour, Tristan Hoare. Image courtesy of Tristan Hoare Gallery.

Colour

Tristan Hoare Gallery
27 February – 29 March, 2025

Colour is of course one of the most salient and important aspects of the visual arts – yet colour is far from a universally understood experience. Artists through the ages have adapted colours to make bold expressions and statements about the world, but this new group show pinpoints the period of Color Field movement in the 1950s and its influence on contemporary colourists.

Curated by Flora Hesketh and Omar Mazhar, this exciting exhibition acknowledges the way various cultural understandings of colour can change the meaning of an artwork, including 27 artists from different continents, from the very established (Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, Howard Hodgkin) to a new generation of artists engaging with colour in different ways (such as Leila Bartell, recently featured on The Wick).

Full of wonder, luster and awe, this exhibitions charts the symbolic significance of colours and the immense evocative power they possess. The possibilities are endless. As Bridget Riley once put it: “If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it’s wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.”

Viewing Pascal Sender: Happy Hour at Saatchi Yates

The Wick Culture - Pascal Sender, Rollanada, 2025. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Above Pascal Sender, Rollanada, 2025. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

The Wick Culture - Pascal Sender, Micela, 2025. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Above Pascal Sender, Micela, 2025. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

The Wick Culture - Pascal Sender, PleasureHunter, 2024. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Above Pascal Sender, PleasureHunter, 2024. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Above Pascal Sender, Rollanada, 2025. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Above Pascal Sender, Micela, 2025. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Above Pascal Sender, PleasureHunter, 2024. Photo courtesy of Pascal Sender and Saatchi Yates

Pascal Sender: Happy Hour

Saatchi Yates
6 March – 11 April 2025

Pascal Sender, a former student of Peter Doig and a graduate of the RA school, is becoming increasingly recognisable for his mind-boggling, complex figurative paintings of contorted, surreal figures and everyday scenes: in one painting, a figure scoots along the road, while in another a bodybuilder postures for a selfie. Sometimes the image is as straightforward as a man waiting for a bus – but Sender makes every moment unforgettable.

This is the Swiss artist’s second solo show at Saatchi Yates, following his debut in 2020. This new body of work focuses on recreation in a digital age, hybrid figures that appear to be part mechanical, and seem to speed along with an intense velocity, on scooters, skates and jet skis.

Sender takes this expression even further in his paintings by introducing the Pascal Sender app, hand coded by the artist, through which his works become animated with Augmented Reality as three dimensional forms. The app can be downloaded and the paintings viewed through your phone – adding another fascinating dimension to this innovative artist’s practice.

Watch our interview with Sender to find out more about the exhibition.