RA Summer Exhibition

Swan Song, 50×40cm, acrylic on linen, 2025

‘Swan Song’ has been hung in Gallery I at the RA Summer Exhibition.

‘This gallery marks the entrance to this year’s Summer Exhibition and has been selected by the printmaker Katherine Jones RA. The room focuses on gardens and allotments, creating a celebratory and uplifting space filled with the natural colours of plants and trees.

Bob and Roberta Smith RA's work Gardens Are the New Galleries neatly summarises the central idea of the room, that gardens are as much places of creativity, community and experimentation as artists’ studios.

Michael Landy RA celebrates weeds, those most unloved of plants, with a sequence of fine studies. Temsuyanger Longkumer’s three-dimensional chopping block challenges the notion of the conventional woodcut print. Elsewhere a striking plant drawing by Jim Dine Hon RA explodes with the energy of a firework, and a painting by the evergreen Olwyn Bowey RA presents an instantly recognisable and intimate image of domestic gardening. Clare Woods RA's screenprint of a chandelier, Puff Ball, could easily be mistaken for a flower arrangement.

Across the gallery hangs Vessel by David and Melissa Eveleigh-Evans. This sculptural piece, which reflects the artists’ interest in humanity and its relationship to nature, draws the four corners of the room together, resembling fruit hanging off a vine.’

From the Royal Academy website.