Spring Exhibitions at Pitzhanger: Light, Legacy & Justice
On a bright, sun-drenched Friday morning, my daughter and I stepped into the historic halls of Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery to explore two deeply moving and visually arresting new spring exhibitions. From the luminous brushwork of Alison Watt to the powerful cast portraits by Nicole Farhi, these shows invite visitors to reflect on beauty, memory, and the complexities of truth.
Alison Watt: From Light
🗓 5 March – 15 June 2025
A sense of calm filled the gallery as we entered From Light, the first major public gallery exhibition in London by celebrated Scottish painter Alison Watt since 2008. This is a collection that rewards slow looking. Created specifically for Pitzhanger, the 18 new paintings are a love letter to light — both as a subject and as a tool for transformation.
Watt draws inspiration from 18th and 19th-century masters like Ramsay and Ingres, yet her approach feels entirely contemporary. Her work sits in conversation with the architecture of Sir John Soane, who designed Pitzhanger to harness and manipulate light through space — a parallel not lost in Watt’s delicate, dimensional paintings.
One of the most striking pieces is a haunting triptych inspired by Oliver Cromwell’s death mask, based on a cast from Soane’s collection. These three paintings seem to emerge from the wall itself — sculptural and shadowed — evoking echoes of Van Dyck’s Triple Portrait of Charles I. They’re subtle, almost spectral, and they linger in your thoughts long after you've moved on.
Another standout moment is Le Ciel, Watt’s poetic depiction of a white rose bud with partially diseased leaves. Displayed in Soane’s former Eating Room, the painting feels like a ghost of a garden — full of symbolism, vulnerability, and quiet drama. Similarly, her series of five rose paintings — Shaken, Heart, The Day After, Watch, Scar — speak to the fleeting nature of beauty and life, echoing Soane’s own obsession with mortality.
In a particularly personal and affecting corner of the exhibition, Watt has curated a collection of cherished objects from her own Edinburgh studio. Displayed in Soane’s Breakfast Room, these pieces — including a goat’s skull once used by her father — act as intimate portals into her practice, grounding the grand themes of the show in tangible, human connections.
Nicole Farhi: J’Accuse
🗓 5 March – 15 June 2025
While From Light lifts the soul, J’Accuse stirs it.
Fashion designer-turned-sculptor Nicole Farhi brings an urgent, haunting presence to Pitzhanger Gallery with this new body of work: 25 ciment fondu busts of individuals who were wrongfully convicted across the past 125 years. Each head, rendered in raw, textured detail and hand-painted in acrylic, stares back at the viewer — quiet but demanding attention.
The exhibition’s title is taken from Émile Zola’s blistering 1898 letter denouncing the false conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a touchstone case that sparked public outcry and inspired Farhi’s own journey into the history of legal injustice. Figures include Timothy Evans, executed in 1950 and later proven innocent — his story helped abolish the death penalty in the UK — and Andrew Malkinson, released in 2023 after 17 years of wrongful imprisonment.
These are not just portraits. They are memorials, testimonies, and acts of resistance. Farhi invites us to meet these individuals eye to eye, to remember their names and stories — and to reflect on the fragility of justice.
Archival materials and press clippings add another layer of emotional weight to the show. Be advised: the subject matter, including accounts of abuse and wrongful imprisonment, may be distressing to some visitors. But it’s also deeply important.
Having admired Nicole Farhi as one of the defining fashion designers of the '80s and '90s, it’s inspiring to witness the evolution of her creative voice — now firmly planted in the world of sculpture, where empathy and activism find form in clay and stone.