LOOK OUT | A Group Exhibition Exploring Landscape Across a Century of Change

David Abbott | Dien Berziga | Christabel Blackburn | Sarah Gillespie | Magnus Hammick | Ivon Hitchens | Lee Johnson | Charlotte Keates | Rob Lyon | Katherine Perrins | Ged Quinn | Myrna Quiñonez | Saad Qureshi | Harriet White

CLOSE Gallery is pleased to present Look Out, an exhibition bringing together artists across generations and living and working in Britain. Their works explore the enduring presence of landscape as both a physical reality and a psychological space. Spanning one hundred years the exhibition traces a century of artistic engagement with the land, revealing how landscape continues to offer a place of reflection, resilience and renewal in times of profound change.

At a moment when the world feels increasingly unstable, environmentally, politically and socially, our internal landscapes are also shifting. The certainty of familiar structures and beliefs is continually challenged, leaving many of us searching for points of connection and grounding. Look Out proposes that nature and the changing seasons remain among the few constants we can rely upon. Landscape, in all its forms, becomes a source of comfort, continuity and belonging, a place where we can orientate ourselves amidst uncertainty.

The exhibition comprises selected works of Ivon Hitchens (1893 to 1979), one of the most influential British landscape painters of the twentieth century. Often regarded as a pioneer of modern landscape painting, Hitchens transformed the genre through his immersive, rhythmic compositions that dissolved the boundaries between observation and sensation. His work shifted the emphasis from simply depicting a landscape to experiencing it, creating a legacy that continues to influence generations of artists. His presence establishes a historical foundation from which the exhibition unfolds, creating a dialogue across a century of artistic practice.

At its core, and to celebrate this year's Somerset Arts Weeks Festival, Look Out is anchored by the work of Saad Qureshi, whose sculptures and imagined topographies occupy a space between memory, dream and invention. His landscapes are neither entirely real nor wholly imagined. They emerge from a deeply personal language of displacement, belonging and transformation. Alongside him, CLOSE Gallery artist in residence Magnus Hammick presents paintings rooted in the Somerset landscape, where instinctive mark making and close observation merge to create works that are both immediate and contemplative. Together, these artists establish a conversation between the external world and the landscapes we carry within ourselves.

Around this central dialogue unfolds a constellation of voices, each approaching landscape through different histories, experiences and materials. Whether through painting, sculpture, drawing or installation, the artists in Look Out reveal landscape as a site of memory, imagination, migration, ecology and emotional connection.

Together, these artists offer multiple ways of seeing and understanding the world around us. Some reflect on inherited relationships to land and place. Others consider movement, displacement and the changing nature of belonging. Material, gesture, colour and form become languages through which these ideas are explored, carrying traces of encounter, memory and lived experience.

Look Out reflects Somerset's rich artistic heritage while extending far beyond geographical boundaries. It draws connections between the local and the global, the personal and the collective, the remembered and the imagined. The exhibition speaks to the vital role artists play in helping us navigate uncertainty, offering new ways of understanding our relationship to the environments we inhabit.

As founder of CLOSE Gallery and Co-Chair of Somerset Art Weeks, Freeny Yianni continues to champion a vision of art that is deeply rooted in place while remaining open to wider conversations about culture, ecology and community.

"Landscape is never simply what we see before us. It is what we remember, what we carry with us and what we hope for. In an era of continual change, the rhythms of nature remind us that transformation is not only inevitable but essential. The works in Look Out invite us to pause, reconnect with the world around us and find our place within it once more." 

Freeny Yianni

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