At Snape Maltings, art and landscape have always shared the stage with music. From 25 July to 30 August, Britten Pears Arts stages its most ambitious summer exhibition yet — five weeks, dozens of works, and a site that stretches from concert hall foyer to dovecote studio. Entry is free. Every piece is for sale, and every sale helps fund the charity’s wider cultural work. The curator for the exhibition is the highly-regarded Devi Singhi.
Gracing the catalogue cover is Abe Odedina’s Foreplay, a bold acrylic-on-plywood panel. Odedina, born in Ibadan and now dividing his time between London and Salvador Bahia, abandoned a career in architecture after a trip to Brazil, and his self-described “folk” style, flat, frontal, unmistakably graphic, draws equally on Yoruba mythology and the hand-painted shopfronts of Lagos and Port-au-Prince. A short walk away, in the Concert Hall foyer, sits the show’s most expensive work: Conrad Shawcross RA’s motorised, mirror-polished steel sculpture. Shawcross, elected the Royal Academy’s youngest Academician at 36, built his reputation on mechanical forms governed by scientific and geometric logic, and this piece keeps that logic turning slowly and silently as concertgoers pass beneath it each evening.
Ash Xu LG, a London-based digital artist and member of The London Group, presents Robotic Arm of Chaos — a small interactive installation that behaves like nothing else on site. Left undisturbed, the arm rotates in slow, steady arcs. The moment a visitor draws near, sensors register the presence and the motion fractures — irregular, unpredictable, almost startled. It’s ambition is the largest in the room: a quiet study of how people and machines might learn to coexist, staged not on canvas but in real time, in front of you. Elsewhere, Maggi Hambling previews her autumn show, Woo Jin Joo’s embroidered landscapes reward a walk across two galleries, and Harry Hill and Dame Maureen Lipman remind visitors that serious collecting and unexpected joy needn’t be strangers. Summer Contemporary runs daily from 10am until the evening performance begins.
