Wild & Whimsical — Exhibition
Tanya Baxter Contemporary | 436 Kings Road, London SW10 | Opening 4 June 2026
This summer, Tanya Baxter Contemporary presents Wild & Whimsical, a vibrant exhibition celebrating colour, imagination, and the expressive power of contemporary and modern art. Bringing together iconic names and distinctive voices, the exhibition explores themes of beauty, memory, nature, and emotion through works that are at once playful and profound.
Alex Katz
One of the great figures of American modernism, Alex Katz has spent over seven decades developing a vocabulary of flat, bold, and deceptively simple imagery. His works from The Flowers Portfolio (2021) — Azaleas on Yellow and Purple Tulips 1 — are quintessential Katz: graphic, joyful, and instantly recognisable, capturing fleeting natural beauty with the cool confidence of a master printmaker.
Andy Warhol
No survey of the wild and whimsical would be complete without Andy Warhol, the defining voice of American Pop Art. The exhibition presents two landmark works: Diamond Dust Shoe 257 (1980), a screenprint encrusted with glittering diamond dust that transforms a mundane object into something glamorous and absurd, and Flowers: One Plate (1970), his iconic silkscreened hibiscus blooms — radical, decorative, and utterly of their time.
Endellion Lycett Green
Endellion Lycett Green is a British botanical watercolourist of exceptional refinement, whose work sits in the tradition of the great natural history illustrators while retaining a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. Represented here by five large-scale watercolours — including Brazilian Iris, Japanese Iris, Parrot Flower and Hemerocallis Japonica — she renders each bloom with a combination of scientific precision and poetic flair.
David Hockney
David Hockney OM CH RA is arguably Britain’s greatest living artist, a supreme draughtsman and colourist whose work spans painting, print, drawing, stage design, and photography across six decades. The exhibition presents Celia Smoking, a limited-edition lithograph printed at the legendary Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, alongside My Pool and Terrace (1983), an etching and aquatint that distils the sun-drenched ease of his Californian world into pure line and tone.
Pip Todd Warmoth
Pip Todd Warmoth is a British painter whose sun-soaked, panoramic oils capture the light and glamour of the Mediterranean with an effortless, almost cinematic sweep. Two works here — View of the Casino and La vue sur la Riviera de l’hôtel Le Méridien, Monaco (2025) — invite the viewer onto a hotel terrace above the shimmering Côte d’Azur.
Tracey Emin CBE RA
Born in London in 1963, Tracey Emin is one of the defining artists of her generation, known for confessional work of frank emotional honesty rendered across neon, painting, drawing, sculpture, embroidery and film. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, she represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and in 2011 became the first woman appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition features her neon I whisper to my past, do I have another choice (2010), a hand-painted lithograph Because you Left — Everything hurt (2022–24), and the bronze sculpture I Wanted You (2017) — a lone bird perched atop a pole that Emin describes as a symbol of “hope, faith and spirituality.”
Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud is widely regarded as one of the greatest figurative painters of the twentieth century, celebrated for his unflinching, psychologically penetrating portrayals of the human form. Head of an Irishman (1999) — a rare etching published by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York — carries all the unnerving intensity of his painted portraits, condensed into the scratched lines of a copper plate.
Bridget Riley CH CBE
Bridget Riley is the pre-eminent figure of Op Art, whose precisely engineered geometric compositions have been mesmerising viewers since the early 1960s. To Midsummer (1989), a screenprint in rich colours, demonstrates the rhythmic, almost musical quality of her work — surfaces that seem to breathe and shift as the eye moves across them.
Paul Hughes
Paul Hughes is a British painter working at the intersection of abstraction and raw material experimentation, layering acrylics, pigments, oils, and varnishes to build surfaces of extraordinary depth and luminosity. His Screaming for Joy series (2025) — together with the large-scale This is kind of about you, This is kind of about me — are exuberant, unrestrained celebrations of colour and light, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of this exhibition.
Rocco Ritchie
Rocco Ritchie is an emerging British painter whose large-scale figurative canvases have attracted significant critical attention. Glinka 2 (2025), presented in the artist’s own hand-crafted frame, is a commanding oil on canvas that announces a young painter working with considerable ambition and confidence.
Callum Innes
Edinburgh-born Callum Innes is one of Scotland’s most celebrated abstract painters, known for a distinctive dissolving technique in which he applies then partially removes oil paint to create luminous, ghostly fields of colour. Untitled No. 159 (2010) is a characteristically spare and beautiful work — a canvas that holds silence and colour in perfect equilibrium.
William Scott CBE RA
William Scott was one of the most important British painters of the post-war era, best known for his iconic still lifes of pots, pans, and simple domestic objects rendered in an almost abstract language. Cup and Pan Blues (1970), a signed screenprint in an edition of 100, is a superb example of his ability to invest the most humble of forms with weight, poetry, and quiet monumentality.
Annie Morris
Annie Morris is a British artist known for her joyful, gravity-defying Stack sculptures — tottering towers of hand-pigmented spheres in concrete, plaster, foam and steel that seem to embody emotional states made physical. Stack 7 (Cadmium Red) (2019), standing at nearly two metres, blazes with the warmth of its pigment and the precarious optimism that is Morris’s hallmark.
Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach is one of the towering figures of post-war British art, renowned for his densely worked oil paintings and drawings of his immediate surroundings and a tight circle of sitters. Primrose Hill (1961) — a crayon and pastel on paper — is an early work capturing the beloved North London landscape that has returned to again and again throughout his career, rendered with the urgent, gestural energy that defines his entire practice.
Russell Young
British-born, Los Angeles-based Russell Young creates silk-screen works that marry the seductive glamour of Pop Art with a raw, painterly energy. His works here — Brigitte Bardot Cowgirl Black and White (2023) and Marilyn Monroe Desire (2010) — are encrusted with diamond dust and rendered in enamel on linen and paper, casting icons of femininity in a light that is at once reverential and unsettling.
Anthony Eyton RA
Anthony Eyton is one of Britain’s most respected figurative painters, a Royal Academician whose long career has produced tender, light-filled observations of everyday life. His Still Life (2023) in oil on canvas is an intimate, richly textured work that demonstrates his enduring mastery of colour and his ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Marc Quinn
Turner Prize-nominated British artist Marc Quinn is known for art that probes the boundaries between nature, science, and the human body. Upper East Side Glacier (2007) is a large-scale oil on canvas presenting a close-up, hyper-real study of floral forms that reads simultaneously as lush and clinical — a meditation on beauty, impermanence, and the fragility of the natural world.
Jack Milroy
Jack Milroy is a British artist whose inventive practice transforms discarded and everyday materials into objects of quiet wonder. The Librarian’s Flowerbed (2026) — a cut-book construction housed in an acrylic case — is a brand-new work that conjures a garden from the pages of literature itself, blurring the line between archive and imagination.
CHELSEA FLOWERS SHOW EXHIBITION & FLORAL DESIGN
Zhuang Hong Yi
Born in Chengdu, China, Zhuang Hong Yi is celebrated for his meditative large-scale works that fuse Eastern and Western artistic traditions. His practice transforms humble materials — rice paper, acrylic pigment — into luminous fields of layered colour and texture that evoke the cyclical rhythms of the natural world. Harmony of Blossoms (2024), a monumental circular canvas in acrylic on fine rice paper, exemplifies his extraordinary ability to make a painted surface bloom with organic life.
Wild & Whimsical opens at Tanya Baxter Contemporary, 436 Kings Road, London SW10 0LJ on 4 June 2026. For enquiries: tanya@tanyabaxtercontemporary.com | +44 (0)20 7351 1367