Charleston announces 2025 exhibitions
29 October 2024 – Charleston is delighted to announce a programme of new exhibitions for 2025, taking place across its two sites, Charleston in Firle and Charleston in Lewes.
Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour
Charleston in Lewes
26 March 2025 – September 2025
Step into the world of Vanessa Bell (b. 1879 d. 1969), a groundbreaking artist and key figure in 20th-century British art, whose creativity spanned multiple disciplines. This landmark exhibition – the biggest ever dedicated to Bell – brings her practice into focus and reveals her as a radical pioneer of modernism in her own right. With over 100 pieces on display, the exhibition explores the full breadth of Bell’s artistic legacy: from her vibrant paintings to her revolutionary textiles, furniture designs, ceramics, and book covers. Rediscover Vanessa Bell – a true trailblazer of modern art – through this stunning showcase of her life’s work. The exhibition is organised by Charleston in partnership with MK Gallery.
Koak
Charleston in Lewes
26 March 2025 – September 2025
The first institutional exhibition of Koak’s work in the UK features a newly commissioned immersive installation at Charleston in Lewes. Koak (b. 1981, USA), based in San Francisco, explores identity and human nature through art, spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. Her work captures emotionally charged figures and landscapes, bringing them to life with a unique and seemingly effortless line. Through her paintings, Koak reclaims the female gaze, addressing how women have been traditionally portrayed by male artists. Her figures range from bold to vulnerable, reflecting the emotional complexity of life. She describes her work as depicting ‘archetypes of self’ that develop throughout life, often shaped by experience, which she reinterprets in her own way. Koak’s use of colour and figurative style brings a contemporary perspective to the traditional portrayal of the female form in art, blending themes of gender, history, and the line between inner and outer worlds. Her work creates a thoughtful dialogue with the legacy of Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury group, continuing their influence on contemporary artistic practice.
Inventing Post Impressionism: works from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts
Charleston in Firle
8 March 2025 – October 2025
Charleston, in partnership with the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, presents a major exhibition showcasing one of the most important impressionist and post-impressionist collections in the UK. This show revisits the groundbreaking 1910 and 1912 Grafton Galleries exhibitions, where critic, curator and frequent visitor to Charleston, Roger Fry first introduced post-impressionism to a shocked British public. Featuring iconic paintings and works on paper by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, the exhibition showcases pieces from Charleston’s permanent collection alongside a significant number of works from the Barber, whilst it is closed to enable building repair works. Alongside the main exhibition, the Spotlight Gallery will feature the return of a Paul Cézanne painting on loan from King’s College, Cambridge. Once owned by economist John Maynard Keynes the painting was famously left in a hedge at Charleston after an auction trip to wartime Paris. This exhibition, blending history, art, and Bloomsbury’s role in shaping British modernism, offers a rare opportunity to explore the lasting impact of Post-Impressionism on British art.
Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders
Charleston in Lewes
October 2025 – March 2026
An exhibition exploring the lives and work of the ‘Two Roberts’ — Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, two Ayrshire artists who first met at Glasgow School of Art in 1933. This infamous duo, both lovers and creative partners, played a vital role in mid-20th century British art influencing contemporaries including Bacon, Freud & Minton. This exhibition, the first in England since 1962, surveys their remarkable creative journey from 1930s Glasgow to wartime Europe, through London during the Blitz, ending in tragedy in 1962. It traces their spectacular rise and fall and puts them back where they were—at the centre of an extraordinary creative landscape in a rapidly changing world. It includes their time in Lewes, Sussex, where they lived from 1947-49, supported by the Miller sisters, patrons connected to the Bloomsbury group. Through a display of paintings, lithographs, etchings, drawings, and archival materials, the show celebrates the personal and artistic bond which shaped their lives and careers leaving a lasting impact on European modernism. The exhibition is curated by writer and broadcaster, Damian Barr, whose new novel, The Two Roberts, will be published by Canongate in September 2025.
Roger Fry
Charleston in Firle
October 2025 – March 2026
Charleston presents the first major exhibition in over 25 years dedicated to Roger Fry as a painter, unveiling a lesser-known aspect of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century British art. Best known for his work as an art critic, writer, and curator, Fry was instrumental in bringing Post-Impressionism to England. His 1910 and 1912 exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London, featuring Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, and others, were revolutionary. They introduced a shocked British public to this bold new movement, helping to ignite the modernist era in Britain and forever changing the course of British art. This exhibition features Fry’s vibrant portraits, landscapes, and interiors, capturing the essence of his time in Paris during the 1920s. Showcasing never-before-seen artworks from private collections alongside national treasures, the exhibition highlights Fry’s innovative use of colour and his concept of ‘significant form,’ key to his artistic philosophy. In partnership with Philip Mould & Company, London and The Museum of Somerset, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see Fry’s paintings in a new light.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
Press album available here.
For press enquiries and media registration for events please contact:
Mary Doherty, Sam Talbot PR
Charleston is a place that brings people together to engage with art and ideas. The modernist home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston was a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they came together to imagine society differently and has always been a place where art and experimental thinking are at the centre of everyday life. Today, we have two locations – the house, garden and galleries at Firle and our new space in Lewes. We present a dynamic year-round programme of exhibitions, events and festivals. We believe in the power of art, in all its forms, to provoke new ways of thinking and living. www.charleston.org.uk