Lund Humphries visits the RA Summer Exhibition 2025

Two of Hall’s Drawings in charcoal and acrylic appear in Gallery III, in which Exhibition Co-ordinator Farshid Moussavi RA has chosen to display pieces from every discipline to animate the space and create a dialogue with the two-dimensional works on the surrounding walls. Hall’s work can also be found in Gallery IV, where Christopher Le Brun PPRA has built his hang around two principles: colour and scale – the perfect room to include Hall’s Winter Sun screenprint. 

Want to know more? Nigel Hall: Sculpture & Drawings is available from the LH website. 

Rose Wylie RA is an artist whose works are immediately recognisable, and her pair of works, Lost City, Drawing and A Lost City (Black) appear side by side in Gallery III. 2026 will see a major solo exhibition on Wylie at the RA - the largest exhibition on the artist to date. Back in 2018, when Grayson Perry curated the Summer Exhibition, Rose Wylie joined Joe Tilson, Cornelia Parker and Perry in creating flags that were hung across Mayfair and St James’s to celebrate 250 years of the RA. Wylie’s flags based on her series Lolita’s House.  

Want to know more? Rose Wylie is available from the Lund Humphries website. 
  

Rose Wylie's 'Lost City' works in Gallery III
 

And speaking of Sir Grayson Perry RA… Gallery IX contains his glazed ceramic vase, Conversations with my Fellow Academicians. As you would expect from Perry the work is tongue-in-cheek and covered in overheard fragments and phrases and pictures of the artist in various guises. There are 3 further works by the artist throughout the exhibition.  

Famously the Summer Exhibition is open to anyone to submit works, and Grayson’s Art Club on Channel 4 put this idea front and centre when it began in the Covid Lockdown, celebrating art and its makers of any type.  

The charity Outside In takes this further, providing a platform for artists who encounter significant barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance, or isolation. We were delighted to work with the charity to publish a book featuring their artists back in 2023. Outside In: Exploring the Margins of Art shares some of the most inspiring artwork produced outside of the mainstream and features an interview with Grayson Perry. More information on the book can be found on the Lund Humphries website.  

The Outside In National Open Exhibition is on at The New Art Gallery Walsall until 19 October 2025.  

In 2023 the Summer Exhibition was curated by David Remfy RA, and this year’s show has his works in Galleries V and IX. Remfry is perhaps best known for large-scale works often depicting people dancing. To Dance Alone is a much smaller work, hung alongside In a Dream – both pictures of young women, eyes closed or downcast, red painted lips, alone. Above them, the exuberant Unanswered Calls from Utopia has a tropical colour palette and two old-style telephones in red and green sit on a table among the palms… 

Want to know more? Our multi-contributed book David Remfry will be published in the UK on 2nd September and is available to pre-order.  

Three of David Remfry's works in Gallery IX
  

Dame Barbara Rae RA is an artist whose themes of landscape and travel are shown in a number of the galleries, with her work appearing throughout, even as the themes of each room shift. Her woodcut print Lone Bear – Arctic in Gallery II (which has been curated to communicate the organic nature of displaying a rich mix of disciplines) is separated from Bear – Cresswell Bay in the Large Weston Room (focussed on the theme of Dialogues, and the relationship between humans and the natural, non-human world). Rae’s Ailsa Craig 3 and 4 are in Galleries IX (focusing on movement and colour) and VI (focusing on reconnecting nature and culture).  

Want to know more? Our book on the artist is no longer in print, but our blogpost from 2013 attests to Rae’s place as a perennial RA favourite.  

Also in Gallery VI, Peter Cook’s drawings are immediately recognisable by the vibrant colour palette and futuristic style. This gallery was curated by Stephanie Macdonald RA and Tom Emerson RA from 6a architects, so there is a noticeably strong architectural presence in their selection. The key theme here is the reconnection of nature and culture within architecture, something lost in the age of modernism, and the morphing, organic forms in Peter Cook’s drawings pay homage to the natural world in the realm of architecture.  

Cook's distinctive drawings feature in the Lund Humphries book Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Architecture, edited by Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx. 

 
Four Peter Cook drawings in Gallery VI 
  

Indeed, the fact that this year’s Exhibition is the first which doesn’t separate the architecture into its own space, means that architectural models feature alongside sculpture, in rooms with hangs that display 2D works from both architectural and artistic disciplines. 

One such model is the plaster model of the Thames Christian School & Battersea Chapel by Henley Halebrown, in Gallery VII. We are pleased to be publishing a book on the work of Henley Halebrown later this year. The practice produces architecture that takes account of the way people actually use buildings and how they affect our sense of well-being. With insightful essays by founding director and architectural writer Simon Henley, this book highlights the critical thinking which is at the heart of their work. 

 
Two views of Henley Halebrown model of Thames Christian School & Battersea Chapel

Architectural works were mixed in throughout the exhibition