Halcyon’s Summer Exhibition champions colour and its perception, both on the surface and beneath, featuring work from the likes of David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Paul Cummins MBE, Dominic Harris, Dale Chihuly, Pedro Paricio, Santiago Montoya, and James McQueen.
Together, the works shown in this exhibition remind us that colour is not merely seen – it is felt, experienced and embodied. Spanning a broad chromatic and conceptual spectrum, these works reclaim colour as a language; a way of sensing, thinking, and being in the world.
The centerpiece of Halcyon’s Summer Exhibition is Paul Cummins’ sculptural cascade of ceramic poppies. Echoing his commemorative installation currently on display at the Tower of London for the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the visceral blood-red poppies are highly charged with the memory of sacrifice and renewal.
Josef Albers once argued that colour is not static or absolute, but is influenced by its surroundings. Dominic Harris takes this idea further in his digital blooms which respond directly to interaction, evolving in real-time with animated digital ecosystems exploring colour through code, rather than pigment. The Promise of Babylon, a new work by Harris, depicts a bursting orb of flowers divided into the four seasons. The flowers morph before the viewer’s eyes as they endure the cyclical nature of time passing. Visitors can also experience an immersive multi-sensory installation room designed by Harris to allow viewers to step into his artworks.
David Hockney’s iPad drawings continue his lifelong inquiry into colour and observation through a digital lens. This medium amplifies his bold choices of palette, allowing Hockney to capture natural luminosity with a new clarity and joy that reaffirms his belief in the emotional resonance of colour.
Dale Chihuly’s blown-glass boat provides an exuberant celebration of colour, overflowing with vivid, organic forms. His backlit drawings on acrylic draw parallels with stained glass windows, showing colour transformed into pure illumination, demonstrating its power to evoke emotion and introspection.
Columbian artist Santiago Montoya’s works continue his ongoing exploration into currency, history and power, offering a striking journey into global economics, national identity, and visual language through the seductive power of currency and colour. At a distance, his works resemble abstract colour fields or sunsets on the horizon, but on closer inspection of their minute details, they invite us to consider global financial systems, political power, and the visual language of currency.
Pedro Paricio is an artist acutely aware of the surrounding world, its environment, history and traditions. Subsequently, his work holds a mirror to his ability to absorb, distill and create. This is evident in Paricio’s tulips, where he transforms one of art history’s most favoured subjects into a monumental study of colour and form; in his reimagining of characters in Greek mythology in Venus, Flora, and Narcissus; and in his journey into the American landscape in his 2023-24 works Mulholland, Pacific Coast and Canyon Road. Across this body of work an unbridled and unfearful devotion to colour reigns, and this is certainly true once more in Paricio’s new paintings featured in the Summer Exhibition.
Colour strikes us first, before form, and before meaning. Often fluid, it shifts in relation to its environment, possessing the power to seduce, sooth, agitate or provoke us. The artworks presented in the Summer Exhibition consider colour as both substance and symbol, revealing a spectrum of materials and meanings.
Halcyon’s Summer Exhibition – 31st August,
Halcyon 148 & 29 New Bond Street
