JULY PLAYLIST
SP LIST: ART EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS
Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence
from 16 March to 20 July 2025
This is the most extensive solo exhibition of Tracey Emin’s work in Italy to date, exploring the artist’s multifaceted career, showcasing both historical and recent works. Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, it delves into Emin’s varied work, encompassing paintings, drawings, film, photography, embroidery, appliqué, sculptures, and neon installations. The titular themes of sex and solitude underpin over 60 works on display, spanning from different moments of her career, taking visitors on an intensely personal yet universally resonant journey that reflects deeply on the themes of the body and desire. Blurring life and art, her intimate works turn personal stories into existential metaphors, defined by vulnerability, raw emotion, and the interplay of love, desire, pain, and sacrifice.
Donna Trope, Polaroids, at Galerie Carol Lambert in Paris
from June 6th to September 24th
A Los Angeles native trained in London; the self-taught Trope reshaped the visual language of fashion and beauty, challenging and transgressing the boundaries of fashion photography with her gritty in-between. This raw and striking selection of previously unseen Polaroids reveal the unscripted energy behind her unapologetic aesthetic and experimentation as a storyteller reframing the overlooked, where outtakes from shoots are a counter-narrative to fashion’s often polished surface.
This exhibition repositions the polaroid as a medium of truth and subversion, exposing the unseen, which perfectly aligns with the signature style which has defined Trope for decades. Featuring images from her collection of some 25,000 physical Polaroids, the show is curated in collaboration with Fany Dupêchez.
Noah Davis’ retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles
from 8 June – 31 August 2025
This major retrospective of Noah Davis offers a powerful overview of the late artist’s extraordinary body of work. With over 50 paintings spanning eight years, the exhibition captures his singular ability to fuse realism and abstraction, intimacy and social critique. Davis depicted everyday Black life with depth and dreamlike grace, often drawing from personal archives and vernacular imagery.
Nadia Lee Cohen and Martin Parr, Julie Bullard, published by IDEA
This new book is a work of photographic fiction by the two photographers. Encased between brown faux leather, modelled on a late seventies photo album acquired on eBay – complete with the familiar gold spiral binding – the book is an imaginative homage to Cohen’s influential and glamorous childhood babysitter, Julie, featuring scenes enacted and staged by Cohen and shot by Parr.
Parr is Cohen’s favourite photographer and she has always wanted to be a character in a book shot by him. " The actual Julie Bullard was my childhood babysitter and possibly the first woman I ever saw in real life with naturally blonde, curly hair. She was my first introduction to glamour in any form. I was starstuck. Memories of her clothes, hair, makeup and home represent the essence of Britain in the 1990s and, for me, there was no one other than Martin to photograph the fragmented re-creation of that fondly remembered warm environment.” (Nadia Lee Cohen)
Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party at The Garden Museum in London
until 21st September,2025
Cecil Beaton was a society figure of many talents — portrait, fashion and war photography, Oscar and Tony award-winning set and costume design, interiors, acting and illustration — ever inspired by gardens and flowers. This ‘common thread’ that runs through much of his work, is now explored in a new exhibition.
Paintings, drawings, sketches for the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera House alongside Beaton’s personal diaries – many of which have never been publicly displayed before – are on show. For the fashionistas, a headdress worn by ballerina Margot Fonteyn in Apparitions, alongside the Surrealist rose coat that Beaton designed and wore at his Fête Champêtre in 1937 at his then home, Ashcombe House, Wiltshire, are also on display. From the extravagant floral installations at his legendary parties and painted fresh blooms in fashion shoots and royal portraits, to the floral theatrics of the unforgettable costumes of My Fair Lady – flowers were his lifelong love.
Isabelle Wenzel, Corps épreuve, at CRP Center in Douchy-les-Mines, France
from May 31 to October 5th
This is the German photographer, acrobat and movement director’s first solo exhibition in France, showcasing her unconventional and highly conceptual approach to photography and performance art. Her work explores the human form and its relationship to space, gravity, and other physical forces; often employing contortionist poses, dance and acrobatic movements to create surreal and disorienting images that challenge the viewer's perception of reality. She has elevated the art of self-portraiture with her sculptural physical and spontaneous feats, placing her own body in front of the camera, organically responding, almost becoming like an extension of it. Wenzel is the body as a physical form, rather than others, experimentally freezing moments in time.
PRIVATE COLLECTION by photographer Steven Klein, published by IDEA
under embargo until June 26, 2025
As one of the world’s foremost photographers, Klein’s seductive and meticulous images are perpetually undercut by a subversive component, and this arresting four-part photobook series offers glimpses into private worlds: anonymous violence, ambiguous objects, fictional crimes, and introspective self-portraits. Unfolding from an archival box, the work contains: Cut Throats, Dildos, Death Kit and Photo Booth; a compendium of visual narratives that feel unearthed rather than made, like a box of forbidden images discovered in a dusty back room.
“PRIVATE COLLECTION is a record of images that were never meant to be seen— private, perverse, sometimes violent. Each book is its own fiction, its own confession. I wanted to create something that feels discovered, not made - like stumbling onto evidence of someone else’s desire. These aren’t stories with conclusions. They’re fragments, obsessions, wounds. Together, they form a kind of intimate archive - one that resists explanation and demands looking. ” Steven Klein
Harley Weir, The Garden, at Hannah Barry Gallery in London
until 13 September 2025
This powerful solo exhibition by the British artist and photographer, presents archival and unseen work in a deeply personal reflection on womanhood, awakenings and transformation. With hand-crafted photographic pieces, darkroom alchemy, and intimate collages, the exhibition unearths new forms of beauty, desire, and fragility, with the physical space of a garden symbolising a place of peace, a personal paradise – a sought-after utopia reflecting the eternal burn of human imagination and desire, Weir’s own santuary that’s shaped by the toil of growth.
Paul Thek: Seized by Joy, at Thomas Dane in London
until 2 August
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Thek’s ‘Technological Reliquaries’, a series of hyper-realistic wax sculptures depicting hunks of flesh encased in Plexiglass containers, catapulted him to early fame in the 1960s. His idiosyncratic approach challenged the polished aesthetics of Pop and Minimalism taking hold in the city at the time, but the success of his “meat pieces” led him to retreat from any fame; instead moving to Europe with his then-partner, photographer Peter Hujar. It was during this period that Thek turned to painting and drawing on newspaper and in sketchbooks – which brings us to London, and the first exhibition in the U.K. dedicated to his painting practice, curated by art writer Kenny Schachter, and installed by fashion designer Jonathan Anderson.
Spanning three decades of the artist’s career, the works on show include paintings, works on paper and previously unseen sketches and writings, offering a window into the more intimate and personal realms of Thek’s visual universe.
Text by Kate Lawson