22 November – 22 December 2023

Fresh from a recent collaboration with Banksy and inclusion in his ‘Cut and Run’ retrospective at GoMA, this exhibition presents a new series of paintings of London by plein air painter Peter Brown. Showcasing 50 views of life on the streets of the city, the exhibition follows two previous presentations by Brown recording the same city subject in its ever-evolving state. ‘A Big Year’ (28 October – 28 November 2020) and ‘London: The Return’ (23 March-24 April 2022), both shown at Messums London, documented the changing life of the city’s streets over two turbulent years.

18 October – 17 November 2023

This October, the Elisabeth Frink studio will be reimagined in our Cork Street gallery and house a collection of her artwork which has been collected over time.

18 October – 17 November 2023

It is little known that life drawing has been integral to the practice of internationally renowned ceramicist Christie Brown. For this exhibition, Brown presents a new body of work which includes a series of large-scale drawings which integrate characters derived from her life drawings over many years.

20 September – 13 October 2023

Makoto Kagoshima’s quirky and exuberant ceramics bridge gaps between folk art, craft and fine art through his imaginative motifs of the natural world, both animal and botanical. His colour palette is full and bright, and his draughtsmanship is clean and illustrative, and the resultant works have a pattern-like quality that simultaneously recalls the decorated black and red narrative vases of the ancient Mediterranean and the refined geometric graphics of post-modern European design.

20 September – 13 October 2023

Drawing has, in recent years, been Poulsen’s primary means of expression which for him offers immediacy and a direct means of communication. He comments, “it evokes and suggests rather than fixes, it feels transitory and ephemeral, echoing the lives we live”.

9 August – 8 September 2023

For over 15 years, Peter Godwin was painting, drawing and making prints while pursuing his teaching career, but at the time was hesitant to exhibit his work. He is rapidly becoming recognised as one of Australia’s most accomplished painters and printmakers.

31 July – 1 September 2023

This exhibition will mark Tuesday Riddell’s third solo show at our Cork Street Gallery following the celebrated success of her previous two exhibitions in 2019 and 2021. Riddell was part of Messums Emerging Talent programme and is one of a number of artists represented by the Gallery whose practice is underpinned by extraordinary craftsmanship in the execution of their work. Riddell works with japanning, a technique originally developed in the 17th century as an imitation of Asian lacquer work

31 May – 30 June 2023

Recently I have been drawing the wild and exquisite world of undergrowth, of brambles and nettles and a million plants I daily forget the names of. I like getting to know these forgotten, overlooked corners, and returning to the same spot day after day, drawing or painting directly from life.

26 April – 26 May 2023

Tom Waugh makes sculptures from stone and marble that depict discarded, mass-produced objects. Plastic bags, cardboard boxes, and tin cans are squashed, crushed, and wrinkled, documenting the casual imprints of human use

26 April – 26 May 2023

Jean-Vincent Simonet (b. 1991) graduated from École cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2014. His practice fuses analogue images, digital techniques, collage, montage, sculpture and painting with remarkable fluidity. His work is permeated by a sense of overload and exuberance and characterised by a penchant for sheer entropy.

26 April – 26 May

Shaun Fraser’s work frequently comments upon notions of identity, links to landscape and connections with place. His practice questions how the landscapes, spaces and places which we inhabit form us and can be translated through personal engagement, privileging one’s own memory as a principal source.

22 March – 21 April 2023

The impact of the work of British-born artist John Walker has resonated for over 50 years. His unique and imaginative painterly language has influenced generations of artists. Walker represented England at the 1972 Venice Biennale, won the 1976 John Moores Painting Prize, had extensive survey shows at both the Tate and Hayward galleries and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985. His work is represented in collections across the world.

6 – 17 March 2023

“All these places are just places, the random legacy of erosion and deposition, ancient volcanic activity, isostatic rise. When we look at the mountains, we see shape and monumental stillness animated, if at all, by the weather: passing rain-showers, the smudges of fog and cloud, sudden bursts of sunlight.

Thursday 2 and Friday 3 March

Messums is thrilled to announce the arrival of new works by international artist Makoto Kagoshima in Melbourne, Australia this March. Based in Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, Makoto Kagoshima originally studied ceramics in Okinawa, Japan before working in the design sector and becoming a full-time artist at age 35.

15 February – 17 March 2023

A key figure in British ceramics, Martin Smith is an artist who approaches clay with the mindset of an architect. He studied at Bristol Polytechnic Faculty of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art, emerging in the midst of the new ceramics movement in the late 1970s and becoming known for his multi-disciplinary approach to design and practice. Smith is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art having been Professor of Ceramics and Glass at the school for 16 years. In his new role he is researching the potential of the digitally printed ceramic surface.

4 February – 16 April 2023

Developed in partnership with Messums Wiltshire, this exhibition will be the first exhibition of contemporary sculpture in the recently completed North Gallery at Orange and will radically transform the space, offering Australian audiences a rare encounter with Laurence Edwards’ work.

11 January – 10 February 2023

One of Messums’ Emerging Talent artists, Jack McGarrity trained at The Glasgow School of Art and The Royal Drawing School with residencies at the Prado and in Florence.

23 November – 6 January 2023

On the occasion of Jeffrey Milstein’s first solo show in the UK, Messums London presents a selection of works documenting patterns of culture in Europe and the United States as viewed from above. Milstein trained as an architect before turning to photography. Growing up his two interests were art and flying; becoming a pilot as a teenager. His first portfolio, Aircraft the Jet as Art, has been exhibited throughout the world, including a year-long solo show at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

19 October – 18 November

This first major collection of playful ceramic works from Kitty Shepherd includes ceramic jars, plates and vases and displays multifaceted stories. At heart, ‘Word of Mouth’ is a simple story of names, colours and social history.

23 September – 14 October

9 paintings to celebrate the 9 month of the year and the Autumn Solstice. Homeric Greek: Ἠέλιος
This selection of work by Richard Hoare centres on an object so omnipresent that we rarely account for its existence, but stop to look, feel and its remarkable nature becomes all the more surprising.

14 September – 14 October

This exhibition will showcase a collection of paintings by one of the leading contemporary figurative artists, Antony Williams, and will present two significant series of portraits.

10 August – 9 September

on Surface showcases the work of a group of emerging contemporary artists who share certain affinities and approaches – Anna Brass, David Cooper, Laurence Grave and Henry Ward – together with works from Messums’ artist and selector of the exhibition, Tom Robinson.

6 July – 5 August

Tom Robinson lives in Norfolk, England. His work space is a large garage-turned-studio without windows where light is drawn through opaque panes of glass in the ceiling. The work in progress is hung on each of the four walls surrounding the artist, creating an intense if sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere. The arrangement allows the works to speak to each other across the room and for different bodies of work – small and very large paintings; paintings on panel and canvas; paintings in vivid colour and in black and white – to proceed in concert.

1 June – 1 July

Dr Yan Wang Preston (b. 1976, Henan Province, China) is recognised for her expert ability to excavate humanity at the heart of landscapes and explore the mercurial relationship between people, nature and place through photography and performance.

27 April – 27 May

Francesco’s diaphanous and dream-like watercolours of Italy are like memories; both contemporary and rooted in history. Working during the spring and summer 2020 in the Italian countryside Francesco’s en plein air paintings are spontaneous notes on the landscape

23 March – 22 April 2022

A record in 50 oil paintings of a desolated London and its inspirational return to the streets we see once again today.
Pete’s next show show at Messums London: ‘London: the return’ follows on from his 2021 ‘Big Year’ exhibition which recorded the Uk’s pandemic experience.

16 February – 18 March 2022

Henry Lamb was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1883 shortly before his father moved the family to Manchester having taken a post in the Mathematics department of Manchester University.

10 – 28 February

We are hosting a pop-up exhibition online and in Melbourne, Australia of a new capsule collection by Makoto Kagoshima. Makoto trained as an artist, and then worked for the Conran Shop in Japan, but it is with clay that he has found his medium. 

12 January – 11 February 2022

Messums London presents its first contemporary photography show by artists Nii Obodai and Justin Keene. Through a selection of delicately composed and elusive images, this exhibition opens up layers of entry points for the viewer, allowing us to consider within an aesthetic language our relationship with nature and read cultural history through the environment.

1 December – 7 January 2022

Two series of paintings from two different residencies on Scottish islands. One in George Orwell’s old house, Barnhill by the sea on the Isle of Jura. The location for the writing of 1984 – a remote and isolated house where time has stood still since Orwell’s own time there.

10 – 26 November

This important exhibition gathers together for the first time in the UK four Canadian artists who span the last three generations, and regions from the east to the west coast.

3 – 26 November 2021

Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga Helme uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed.

7 – 29 October

This exhibition features works from artists including Lucien Pissarro, Rose Hilton, Sandra Blow, Henry Lamb, Sir Terry Frost, Clive Bowen and Stephen Dixon amongst other prominent names from British art shown alongside iconic pieces of design including a Jane Atfield RCP2 chair which is the first chair to be made from recycled plastic.

We are delighted to showcase these remarkable sculptures here on Cork Street and to preview the maquette and concepts for the public commission to be installed at Printers Office Street, Doncaster in May 2020. In 2018 Laurence Edwards was awarded a commission by the town of Doncaster for a sculptural installation celebrating and remembering the […]

15 September – 1 October

Messums Photography present a selection of works from the series ‘In the Shadow of the Pyramids’ by award-winning British Egyptian documentary photographer Laura El-Tantawy, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Egyptian revolution.

15 September – 1 October

Robert Capa (1913 – 1954) is a legend in the history of photojournalism and possibly the most famous war photographer of the last century.

18 August – 10 September 2021

Francesco Poiana’s diaphanous and dream-like renditions of Italy are like memories, both contemporary and rooted in history. Working en plein air in the Italian landscape, these recent paintings are spontaneous, visual notes that speak to the past as well as something of our contemporary concerns.

16 June – 9 July

From as early as the 1970’s Walker was one of the most influential and imitated painters working in the UK; he exhibited alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, represented his country at the 1972 Venice Biennale, had extensive survey shows at both the Tate and Hayward galleries and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985.

12 May – 11 June

Christie Brown’s figures teeter on the foggy intersection between art and craft. Very clearly sculptural but informed by a deep history of clay. Upon graduating from a diploma in Studio Pottery at Harrow in the early 1980’s, Brown found her work without an obvious niche.

12 May – 11 June

Messums London is pleased to present Tales of Africa, an exhibition of 15 photographs of renowned author Karen Blixen’s life in Kenya and a commentary on the objects as markers of colonial history.

14 April – 7 May

Artist Antony Williams works almost exclusively in egg tempera – a painstaking, exacting medium in which egg is used instead of linseed oil as the binding medium. While oil allows for a degree of flexibility and manipulation of the painted surface before it dries, many days after initial application, this technique does not easily allow for alteration.

17 February – 13 March 2021

Messums is delighted to represent the important contemporary painter John Beard, whose work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in the collections of major gallery museums and institutions, and to welcome to the gallery for his first UK since 2013.
John Beard is a painter of the late 20th century whose subject is as much the process of painting as it is the artworks he makes and his practice, which has spanned over forty years, explores important propositions about the role of painting in the 21st century.

2 – 23 December

Messums is delighted to announce the forthcoming solo shows of long represented artist, James Dodds.
Dodds began his artistic career at Chelsea School of Art before going on to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1984. In many ways however it began when he left school to work as a shipwright where he learnt the craft that would continue to influence him and his creative practice.
Though initially drawn to abstraction the tidal pull of the fascinating and at times surreal beauty of the built vessel bought him back to his true focus. Floating on plains of colour, away from the human hands that built them, these paintings, which still draw on an element of abstraction, are anatomical studies. To Dodds, these vessels are his models, his sitters that come into the studio to sit for a portrait.

10 – 30 November

We are delighted to help support the fundraising initiative ‘Custodians for Covid’ set up by Oxford-based photographer Joanna Vestey and collaborator Tara Rowse in order to raise funds for threatened arts institutions. It’s first edition focuses on raising money for theatres currently in crisis due to the Covid-imposed lockdown. This includes world renowned theatres such as The National Theatre, The Roundhouse and the Young Vic. It’s second edition will be displayed, one photograph or institution a day, in our Cork Street gallery window.

28 October – 28 November

A new exhibition of paintings by Peter Brown documents the spring and summer of 2020; from the empty streets of London to the masses crammed onto the beaches of the south coast of England.

30 September – 24 October

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen, born in Copenhagen in 1934, is one of Denmark’s most esteemed and decorated sculptors and we are delighted to represent his work in the UK. Throughout
his entire artistic career he has consistently and independently focused his attention on the human condition in society and has shifted effortlessly between materials and modes
of expression within the sculptural sphere – each transformation has been mastered with continuous success.
Whilst Jørgen works in materials including bronze and marble, this exhibition – his debut at Messums London – will focus on his white clay works, one of the most basic of materials
that has always been in line with his aesthetic approach.
According to legend, God modelled human figures out of clay. He breathed life into them, let them live and will determine if they deserve to burn in hell or not.
In front of Jørgen’s work, we lose our sense of position and we experience uncertainness for
a moment as we determine if we are looking
at sculptures or if we are looking at ourselves. With the positions he chooses, the situation
of the human and the clay, Jørgen unveils the relationship between the human and his own filth. When we look at his figures, we don’t know what to see: the humanity of the clay or the muddiness of humanity. Is he presenting to us a humanity we don’t know or what we don’t want to know about our humanity?
Armen Agop

2 – 26 September

Daniel Agdag is an artist and filmmaker based in Melbourne, Australia whose practice sits at the nexus of sculpture and motionography. He creates highly detailed sculptural pieces that have been described as ‘architectural in form, whimsical and antiquated in nature and inconceivably intricate’ and we are delighted to welcome him back for his second solo show with the gallery this autumn.
Daniel sits within a group of artists represented by the gallery who take quality and the handmade to the extreme. His works, made primarily from cardboard, take many hours to complete and are strikingly beautiful in their intricacy. Drawn to the utilitarian origins and monochromatic presentation of his material, Daniel creates a paradox of fragility and strength with structures that resemble architectural forms and machines by utilising a medium that is essentially paper, preserving them under glass vitrines or bell jars. His work is both delicate and eccentric and he spends a lot of time thinking about and absorbing objects in the built environment, their peculiar details and functions, which, once resolved in his mind, begin to slowly emerge, and coalesce.

2 – 26 September

There is nothing too inferior or not worthy of being turned into a work of art according to Andrew Hemingway. Like the Dutch painters of the Golden Age or the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, Hemingway finds inspiration in the ordinary fixtures of domestic life and turns them into pieces of visual poetry.
So it is with his latest series of 16 pictures of cardboard toilet roll interiors which appear almost anarchic as an artistic subject yet are translated by the immense skill and sensitivity of the artist into objects of beauty, personality – even dignity.

8 – 28 August 2020

Atong Atem is an Ethiopian born, South Sudanese artist living in Melbourne. Atem works primarily with photography and video to explore contemporary identity through portraiture and in particular the fluidity of migrant narratives and postcolonial practices in the African diaspora.
Atem explores concepts of home and identity through a critical and sentimental lens and references the works of photographers Malick Sidibe and Seydou Keita as well as science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler as her aides in navigating these liminal spaces.
Atem has exhibited her work across Australia, including MUMA Monash, Gertrude Contemporary, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Internationally at Red Hook Labs in New York, Vogue Fashion Fair in Milan and Unseen Amsterdam art fair.
First collected by this gallery on a visitto Melbourne in 2019, we are delighted to welcome Atem to Cork Street as part of our Emerging Talents programme and to be exhibiting her collection of self-portraits and family studies. Her work is hung alongside the work of New York born and raised Neal Slavin, providing a juxtaposition of individual responses to the thoughts of how we identify both as individuals and as groups.

8 – 28 August

This summer at Messums London we will focus on photography as part of the wider picture alongside our debut for Emerging Artist Atong Atem. Nancy Bundt will be headlining this new collection with her iconic images of the musician Prince. Photographing fame and power, from pop stars to prime ministers, the journey of Bundt’s career led to her being the official photographer of Prince’s Purple Rain tour in the mid 1980s.

8 July – 5 August 2020

In the last four months we have had more than the usual time to plan for this exhibition. Whilst we did not know when we would be able to re-open, we made the decision at the beginning that whatever journey we were about to go on we were going there with our artists and we needed to help each other. This show is a thank you to all of those artists who have made this last period a shared experience and we are delighted to bring this together as the first exhibition in our London Gallery.

We are delighted to showcase these remarkable sculptures here on Cork Street and to preview the maquette and concepts for the public commission to be installed at Printers Office Street, Doncaster in May 2020. In 2018 Laurence Edwards was awarded a commission by the town of Doncaster for a sculptural installation celebrating and remembering the […]

  PAPUNYA TULA ARTISTS Paintings and Woodblock from the Western Australian Desert   Indigenous Australian people have lived in the remote deserts of Australia for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several communities from the Western Desert region – primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri and Arrernte peoples – to […]

Kurt Jackson has for a long time been a champion of the environmental movement. Whilst his paintings, with their range of media and texture and their three dimensionality, are clear calls to experience the physicality of the world first hand – to get in there amongst it all, to realise that this landscape – so threatened as rivers […]

Messums London and Wiltshire is honoured to announce representation of Albert Paley’s work and studio in Europe and Australia. Albert Paley joins a roster of artists whose working practice is exemplified by their choice of material. As representatives of Paley’s work in Europe and Australia we are delighted to present an exhibition of his drawings […]