The Royal Academy presents the 254th Summer Exhibition, a unique celebration of contemporary art and architecture, providing a vital platform and support for the artistic community. Celebrated British sculptor Alison Wilding RA will co-ordinate this year’s Summer Exhibition, and working with the rest of the Summer Exhibition Committee, will explore the theme of climate. Works by El Anatsui and by Govinda Sah 'Azad' will be presented.

Sokari Douglas Camp CBE's new sculptures are especially created for display at KCAW Art Trail, next to The Design Museum, where her work once stood as part of the Commonwealth Institute. The works can be viewed from the 18th June throughout the summer and during Kensington + Chelsea Art Week from 23rd June to 3rd July.

Le Jardin d'Afrique, Zarzis, Tunisia, by Rachid Koraïchi, has been shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 2022.

The artist, Rachid Koraïchi, began to design, co-ordinate and create Le Jardin d'Afrique, after purchasing a plot of land near Zarzis, in southern Tunisia, in 2018. The result, a memorial garden of great beauty, is an ecumenical cemetery that provides a sanctuary and dignified place of final repose for hundreds of unburied bodies found washed ashore along the Tunisian coastline. The unclaimed corpses of these men, women and children are the sad remains of individuals of all nationalities and faiths, who have drowned, by misadventure, while crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

The entire project is Rachid Koraïchi’s heartfelt response to news that these migrants’ bodies were being disposed of on a local refuse tip. Le Jardin d'Afrique is intended as a personal tribute to those countless individuals who have perished in searching for a better life elsewhere. Basing this mortuary monument on our shared notion of paradise as a garden of repose full of sweet-smelling flowers and the evocative sound of fresh water, this welcoming African garden exemplifies what one individual can do to alleviate the desperate distress caused by this intolerable situation.

Photographic representations of the twenty shortlisted entries are currently on display in an exhibition in King’s Cross, from the 2nd to the 30th of June, as part of the King’s Cross Outdoor Art Project, coinciding with the London Architecture Festival.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1977 to identify and encourage building concepts that successfully address the needs and aspirations of communities in which Muslims have a significant presence. The AKAA’s selection process emphasises architecture that not only provides for people’s physical, social, and economic needs, but that also stimulates and responds to their cultural objectives.

To accompany Eddy Kmuanga's Ghost of the Present exhibition we released a new set of limited edition giclée prints.

Explore our store for other prints, exhibition catalogues and books.

As energy is poured into the return to a supposed “normality,” October Gallery is delighted to announce a radical departure in the form of a collaborative association with the New School of the Anthropocene. This is an ensemble of experienced academics from the higher educational world who, in the company of fellow artists and practitioners, wish to restore the intellectual adventure and creative risk that once characterised arts education in the UK.

Today’s university system appears unfit for purpose, yoked to punishing systems of debt finance and managerial bureaucracy, and falling miserably short in its responsibility to nurture future generations as mindful participants within the complex universe in which we are all embedded. In proposing a genuinely affordable interdisciplinary education, the New School of the Anthropocene at October Gallery will, from September 2022, open its doors to like-minded students of all kinds who consider experimentation across the critical-creative seam to be the prerequisite to personal resilience and cultural renewal.

Four decades after our revitalising renovation of the old school in Holborn, October Gallery will again transform to provide an appropriate environment for the New School to come. Come and join us!

Written by two acclaimed scholars, Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, 'El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture', is the product of more than three decades of research, a comprehensive, incisive and authoritative account of the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned, Ghanaian-born sculptor.

Published by Damiani, this book shows why his early wood reliefs and terracottas, and the later monumental metal sculptures, exemplify an innovative, critical search for alternative models of art-making. 'El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture' places Anatsui’s work within a broader historical context, specifically the postcolonial modernism of mid-twentieth-century African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana, as well as within the intellectual environment of the 1970s Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, and subjecting his work to vigorous analysis, the authors show how and why El Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time.