The first multidisciplinary exhibition to focus on the legacies of Tudor history and art in contemporary artistic practice will open at The Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge, UK in February 2026, running to April 2026.
The exhibition, curated by Dr Christina J Faraday, will feature works by eleven contemporary artists working across painting, digital media, video and photography, animatronics, ceramics, jewellery and silversmithing, set alongside rarely seen objects from historical collections in Cambridge.
The Tudor period brought the advent of many ‘modern’ ideas in the realms of politics, religion, and society; it also witnessed the first two English Queens Regnant, and the rise of England’s imperial and colonial ambitions abroad. Above all, it produced some of the most exciting and iconic images and objects in British art of any period. Many artists today are interrogating similar themes, making the era fertile ground for exploring issues of power, identity and artifice.
The centrepiece of the exhibition will be Mat Collishaw’s Mask of Youth, an animatronic re-imagining of Elizabeth I’s ‘real’ features, seen here for only the third time in the UK since it was commissioned for an exhibition at the Queen’s House, Greenwich in 2018. It will be joined by Stephen Farthing RA’s Elizabeth I: In a Field of Stars, a work made specially for this exhibition, and shown alongside works by The Singh Twins, Linder Sterling, Chan-Hyo Bae, Peter Brathwaite, Eleanor Breeze, Natasja Kensmil, Serena Korda, and Jane Partner, all of which deploy Tudor art and imagery in ways that speak urgently to contemporary audiences.
The exhibition will present the contemporary artworks alongside loans of historical works from the Old Schools and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, creating conversations across time and media. The exhibition will explore themes such as the representation of power; bodily presentation and bodily regulation; artistic responses to gender, race and ‘otherness’ within British and imperial histories; magic, technology and hidden forces, and the question of artistic artifice and art’s (in)ability to give access to ‘real’ historical subjects.
Historical themes and forms have been present in postmodern art for more than fifty years, but in recent decades irony and pastiche have begun to give way to a more ambivalent and sincere engagement with the past. This exhibition will foreground a diverse range of contemporary material practices, many of which have extraordinary parallels with the methods of artists in the pre-modern period, particularly with regard to attitudes about artistic individuality and originality, collage and multidisciplinarity.
The exhibition will be free and open to the public, with a programme of events running alongside the Cambridge Festival. There will be an exhibition catalogue with contextual essays by academics, artists and practitioners, and images for all of the contemporary works included in the exhibition. Tudor Contemporary is the third exhibition in The Heong Gallery’s ‘Visual Enquiries’ programming strand, which showcases the relationship between the visual arts and interdisciplinary scholarship within the University of Cambridge.
Curator of Tudor Contemporary, Dr Christina Faraday, says: “This exhibition provides a startling new angle on methods and attitudes currently at play in contemporary art, revealing the ways certain artists are taking inspiration from the art of the Tudor period, and using it to address issues of vital concern to the present moment. Juxtaposing contemporary works with historical objects that have inspired them, the show reveals surprising resonances between contemporary practices and those of Tudor artists.”
Facilities
- Disabled Accessibility
- mostly flat terrain
- wheelchair access
- wheelchair accessible
