AFTER NATURE continues at PROPOSITION, Bethnal Green

Proposition and CLOSE are delighted to announce that after a very successful showing at CLOSE in Somerset, the acclaimed group exhibition, After Nature, will transfer to Proposition in Bethnal Green.

Featuring internationally acclaimed artists such as Richard Long and David Nash, After Nature also includes work by overlooked pioneers and next generation talent, including Mercedes Balle, Chris Dury, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Alex Hartley, Magnus Hammick, Simon Hitchens, Tania Kovats, Alastair & Fleur Mackie, Onya McCausland, Nissa Nishikawa, Aimee Parrott, Lotte Scott and Fred Sorrell. The exhibition offers a timely exploration of the ways in which artists are looking at and thinking about nature in the twenty-first century, with works spanning a range of media, including sculpture, ceramics, drawing, painting and photography.

After Nature explores ways of making art 'after' nature, in imitation of natural forms and systems, but it is inevitably haunted by the idea of coming after nature too. It is now more than three decades since the American author and environmentalist Bill McKibben published The End of Nature (1989), one of the first books written for a general audience which warned of the imminent climate crisis, suggesting that we now live in a ‘post-natural world’ (so great and so pervasive has the impact of humanity been on the non-human). Yet in 2025 we find ourselves living in a world where extreme weather events are increasingly common, and political leaders question the reality of climate change and double down on fossil fuel extraction.

Artists have long addressed the complexities of these issues, often quietly and non-polemically, but with subtle power and insistence. By making work that interrogates the ways in which culture can represent and reflect the environment, art can perhaps offer us new ways of understanding our present predicament. This is therefore a show both for and about the present moment, an exhibition for a time of environmental collapse, for a quickening emergency.

The exhibition was originally conceived for CLOSE, a gallery in Somerset that sits within a rural landscape, much of which has been rewilded. In that context the exhibition seemed to speak to its setting, the works entering into a dialogue with their surroundings, creating a powerful connection between inside and outside. Proposition offers a very different context. Embedded in one of the biggest cities in the world, Proposition exists to ‘provoke reimagination and action around the potential positive impact that our civilisation can have on biodiversity and ecological resilience.’ The organisation’s ethos is that art can allow us to ‘build connections, inspire emotion and engage people in a creative and innovative way that can raise awareness and make [the issues we face] more accessible.’

In the heart of London’s east end, After Nature, which reflects upon our relationships with nature, becomes a form of resistance, an alternative way of thinking forward at a time of climate emergency.

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