This exhibition presents the largest solo display of Pearl Alcock’s drawings and paintings to date – all from the Whitworth Collection.  Following the Brixton riots in the early 1980s, trade in the café ceased and Alcock was forced onto the dole. Unable to afford a birthday card for a friend, she made one instead. This […]

In Sara Lee’s ‘Beckoning Lines’ she produces intense pastel drawings of landscapes that have no bearing on distance.  Each is a desert of infinity where one is pulled into the nuance of surface.   

‘My Kind of Protest’, is an exhibition of works by Emma Amos, Vivian Browne and Chemu Ng’ok. Working across different time periods, each of these artists creates psychologically charged portraits addressing what it means to be a black woman in a society ruled by men. While some of these works date back 60 years, they […]

Lucy Jones’s paintings conduct a journey through both interior landscapes and the external world beyond.  Landscapes and Inscapes, an exhibition of new landscape and portrait paintings includes a portrait of artist Grayson Perry, commissioned by the Attenborough Arts Centre (University of Leicester) which will be displayed for the first time. 

An exhibition in Paris by Annette Messager with new works and a set of new drawings, including her first video installation, Lost in Limbos (2019). The exhibition opens with a series of mural sculptures titled Sleeping Songs. To create them, Annette Messager worked with coloured sleeping bags, quilts and hooded puffer jackets. Emphasising their tremendous versatility and rich […]

After moving to Paris from Beirut in 1970, Huguette Caland achieved artistic recognition with her exuberant and erotically charged paintings that challenged traditional conventions of beauty and desire. The female physique is a recurrent motif in her work, often painted like landscapes with voids and mountain-like forms. Shifting between figuration and abstraction, large, colourful canvasses and detailed drawings […]

Posy Simmonds’ sharp satire and progressive female characters have defined a career spanning 50 years. This retrospective will feature her early-career pastiches, iconic cartoon strips for The Guardian and children’s books such as Fred, which became an Oscar-nominated film. It will also include the first ever British graphic novel, True Love, unseen pages from Tamara Drewe and drawings […]

A solo exhibition and premiere of Zoe Williams’s new moving image work, Sunday Fantasy. The work uses the language of fantasy to play with and subvert dominant power structures, dissecting and interrogating current representations of the erotic and viewing them through an importantly female and queered lens.

Business As Usual, is a solo exhibition by Alberta Whittle, a multi-faceted artist whose practice includes film, performance, and various forms of collage and assemblage, Whittle is known for work which uses the body as a site of potential for transformation and resistance. Creating space to acknowledge the effects of history on the present, she […]

Nightjars and Allies, is the fourth solo exhibition by American artist Elizabeth Neel. The exhibition features new paintings on canvas that continue to foreground Neel’s reflections on our surrounding physical landscape well as the inner landscape of the mind. The exhibition takes its name from a new painting, Nightjars and Allies, and is the largest scale […]

Intimate, powerful and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable, Claudette Johnson’s studies of black men and women demand attention and command respect. This show, I Came to Dance, is an overview of one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today.

Phoebe Boswell combines traditional draftswoman-ship and digital technology in The words I do not have yet. The words of poet Audre Lorde and Kenyan activist Wambui Mwangi with other female voices are overlaid on drawings of women’s contested bodies. Apariciones/Apparitions, by Carolina Caycedo, features costumed dancers performing. Brown, black and queer bodies, informed by the rituals associated with the Afro-Brazilian […]

A Retrospective of Natalia Goncharova, who gained international fame in her own lifetime for her trailblazing experiments in painting and design.  She designed costumes and backdrops for Ballets Russes performances in cities including Paris, Madrid and London, and her artistic output traces, influences and transcends the art movements of the 20th century.  The exhibition explores her diverse sources and […]

Senga Nengudi's work has been at the forefront of sculptural, performative, and photographic practices for over forty years. Using simple materials in innovative, unexpected ways, Nengudi’s compositions evoke a rich array of references, from subtle allusions to the body, to feminist considerations of space and movement, to the confluence of different cultural and religious rituals.  […]

If they come is Deborah Roberts' first solo exhibition in Europe, in which she combines collage with mixed media. Roberts' figurative works depict the complexity of black subject-hood and explore themes of race, identity and gender politics. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication featuring an essay by Daniella Rose King, Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at […]

The Echo of Your Departures  by artist and curator Azadeh Fatehrad, explores the history of the feminist movement in Iran, as well as the lives of contemporary women in diasporas, focusing on issues of identity, femininity, emotion, desire, clothing norms and moral values. The exhibition comprises three multi-media installations; National Unity of Women (2016), The Dance of Fabric (2015) and The […]

For Found Gestures, Susan Giles and Sally Morfill record visuospatial imagery made by those who witnessed exhibitions and events at Five Years’ primary venues during its twenty-year history. They select fragments of these threads from a mass of motion capture data, removing them from their fleeting context and translating them into material objects. In attending to […]