The first retrospective of artist Pacita Abad spans the artist’s 32-year career and includes more than 50 works – most of which have never been on public view in the United States prior to this exhibition – showcasing her experiments across mediums, including textiles, works on paper, costumes and ceramics. Largely self-taught, Abad is best known for her trapuntos, quilted paintings made by stitching and stuffing her canvases as opposed to stretching them over a wood frame.

André Masson’s non-doctrinal presence among the Surrealists, the invention of automatic drawing and sand pictures, his fruitful relationships with the artists and thinkers of his time, and the influence of his drawings and canvases on the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism are the best-known aspects of his œuvre whose overall power is not yet fully appreciated. 

This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of two extraordinary Impressionist painters, Mary Cassatt and Helen McNicoll. Renowned for their depictions of modern womanhood, their work had a profound impact on the development and proliferation of Impressionism in North America. Cassatt was an original member of the Impressionist movement in Paris, and a generation later, McNicoll contributed to the movement’s evolution and spread around the globe. 

The rise of Nazism and chaos of global warfare in the 1930s and 1940s drove over fifty art dealers, largely but not exclusively Jewish, from Continental Europe to seek refuge in Britain. Settling in London, they became part of the British art network, forming an important part of the artistic émigré network, both working in existing galleries and founding new ones.

The exhibition unveils the untold story of a remarkable duo, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece, exploring their life through paintings and drawings, works which were created by Hepworth but exhibited under the signature of her lifelong partner, Preece. Here, the artists are recognised as collaborators and co-conspirators for the first time.