Richard Slee: Sunlit Uplands and Withdrawing Rooms
25 September 2026 to 10 January 2027
The Holburne is delighted to present Richard Slee: Sunlit Uplands and Withdrawing Rooms, which brings together major works from the last few years by one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary ceramic artists.
Spanning the Holburne’s Ballroom and other galleries, the show presents Slee’s major ceramic installation Sunlit Uplands (2021) and more recent works that address interior
themes, revealing how the artist’s enquiries into the history of the medium – through references to the decorative, the ornamental and the symbolic – provides a piercing yet witty commentary on present times.
For more than 50 years, Slee has disrupted the conventions of ceramics with works that frequently touch upon issues at the heart of contemporary culture and debate. Sunlit Uplands takes its name from a trope beloved of certain political fi gures: Winston Churchill, who used it in his famous “We shall fi ght on the beaches” speech, given in 1940 to inspire the population during the Battle of Britain and, most recently, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who appropriated it to describe a vision of post-Brexit Britain. Slee’s Sunlit Uplands (2021) comes together as an archipelago of more than 400 individual, meticulously crafted ceramic islands. With their references to idyllic landscapes, these high-gloss, brightly coloured ceramics evoke both the idealism of the politicised phrase and its inherent artifi ce. Covering a vast area in the Holburne’s Ballroom, Sunlit Uplands is a major, powerful piece of satire commenting on political events.
In the second part of the exhibition, titled Withdrawing Rooms, new and recent works on display off er a contemporary twist on the concept of interior and exterior and all, in differing ways, deal with the theme of the interior.
Slee presents numerous examples of an on-going series of picture frames, as well as a mantelpiece inspired by Tory MP Gavin Williamson who, prior to his political career, held the title of Fireplace Salesman of the Year in 2007 and 2008.
Elsewhere is a work comprising a pair of oversize ceramic candlesticks, Candlesticks (after Magritte) (2012), whose glaze matches the gradient used by René Magritte in his 1938 painting La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed), depicting a steam locomotive bursting out of a fireplace into an empty room; and a clock, Seventeen minutes to one (2020), which references the London International Surrealism Exhibition in 1936, a landmark exhibition which included leading continental European and British surrealist artists. Here Slee, who is known for making ceramic objects for which clay is clearly inappropriate, demonstrates his eye for the details of domestic interiors which comes to bear in his transformation of commonplace things into something extraordinary through changes in scale and changes in context. Slee playfully highlights that there are layers of meaning behind even the most ordinary action.
Director of the Holburne, Chris Stephens, said: “I first saw Richard Slee’s work at Tate St Ives in 2003 and am thrilled to present his work at the Holburne. Sunlit Uplands must be one of the most ambitious ceramic works of recent years and captures the current political moment with Richard’s characteristic wit and in his typical style of high-gloss and brightly coloured ceramic. The dialogue between his art and Holburne’s collection of porcelain from Meisen, Bow and beyond is brilliantly illuminating.”