SPLASH: SEA, BEACH AND POOL
Bringing together works from our artists, the exhibition explores water as both subject and symbol, a recurring
motif throughout the history of art. From the vast horizon of the sea to the constructed geometry of the swimming pool, water has long represented reflection, transformation, desire, memory and the unknown. It is at once a boundary and a passage, a surface and a depth.
Across photography, water becomes a way of seeing: light dissolves, forms blur, horizons disappear, and the familiar shifts into something timeless and elemental.The exhibition traces these ideas through iconic 20th century photography and contemporary perspectives, examining how artists have returned to the sea, the beach and the pool as sites of projection, intimacy and escape.
Alongside this, images of pools, fashion, leisure and the body evoke a sense of ease and freedom, capturing moments of glamour, sensuality and stillness suspended in time. The exhibition also reflects on the mysteries that lie beneath the surface, and on the fragility and vulnerability of marine environments within today’s industrialised world.
Moving between stillness and movement, abstraction and documentation, the works reveal the enduring visual and symbolic power of water across generations and styles.
Audrey Hepburn in the Pool, On the set of ‘Two for the Road’, St Tropez, 19660
Jerry Hall on a USSR plinth inscribed ‘Jerry Hall, Vogue magazine in the USSR, 1975’
