Opening at Lightbox Gallery & Museum this month are two exhibitions curated by contemporary artists to create conversations between their own work and their selections from The Ingram Collection.
In the First Floor Gallery, acclaimed contemporary artist Permindar Kaur presents Strange Bedfellows, a major solo exhibition exploring the tensions between childhood innocence and adult anxieties, and the home as both sanctuary and site of strangeness. Known for her sculptural installations using altered domestic objects – beds, toys and chairs – Kaur constructs evocative, uncanny environments that explore memory, displacement and identity. For this exhibition, Kaur sets her own works alongside pieces from The Ingram Collection, creating unexpected dialogues between personal memory and broader histories of modern British art.
Permindar Kaur’s artistic practice extends over more than three decades during which time she has become one of Britain’s most innovative artists. Known for her deft manipulation of materials including glass, metal and fabric, and for her evocative exploration of home, childhood, memory and cultural identity, her work defies easy categorisation. With its fastidious regard for scale and form, her work is both alluring and contemplative.
Kaur’s outdoor installation Overgrown House (2020) was included in Compton Verney’s major Sculpture in the Park project for 2024 alongside works by Louise Bourgeois and Helen Chadwick, and the artist has had major solo exhibitions at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, Djanogly Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery and more.
“Being asked to curate a show from the Ingram Collection, one of the largest collections of modern British art, has been fascinating for me,” says Kaur. “It’s been particularly interesting to set up conversations between works coming from very different points in time.”
On the Second Floor, Light Sleeper: Frances Pinnock presents new work by the 2024 Ingram Prize winner, exhibited alongside her own curatorial selection from The Ingram Collection.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by Pinnock’s work Light Sleeper from The Ingram Collection. The work shifts between sculpture, painting and drawing, employing leather both as a material for creating form and as a surface for painting.
Frances Pinnock’s intricate works in sculpture and painting arise from a constellation of observations and emotional states. Often working with leather, parchment and horsehair, paired with found objects and metal components, each piece is meticulously handcrafted, featuring technical processes from garment construction, puppetry and bespoke shoemaking – while her paintings harness a more alchemical approach, guided by oxidation and mark making.
Frances Pinnock lives and works in London. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and Light Sleeper is her first solo exhibition in a public institution, with a further solo show, Accoutrements & Illuminations, running 13 October – 29 November 2025 at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, London.
For further information: lightbox.org.uk
Image: Frances Pinnock (b. 1990), Light Sleeper, 2024, Leather, brass, horsehair, iron sulphate, calligraphy, ink, shellac, © Frances Pinnock, photography the Artist
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