A painting by Rachel Lancaster of a woman with a buttoned up blue shirt

WORKPLACE – Contemporary Art Gallery

A painting by Rachel Lancaster of a woman wearing a salmon coloured shirt

News:

Sitting Still by Rachel Lancaster acquired by MIMA, UK

We are delighted to announce that Rachel Lancaster’s painting Sitting Still, 2025 has been acquired by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA).

The work will join the permanent collection alongside artists such as Tracey Emin, Sonia Boyce, Veronica Ryan, Eileen Cooper, Victor Pasmore and Francis Alÿs. MIMA will host the Turner Prize in 2026.

Rachel Lancaster's practice is focused on painting and its intersections with the languages of cinema, music and photography. Photographic ‘stills’ from found moving imagery, alongside an archive of her own photographs are selected from, edited and then translated into oil paintings. Lancaster's paintings represent detailed fragments of a greater narrative. She is drawn to seemingly insignificant passing shots, extreme close ups of inanimate objects, common place domestic interiors; the split second moments that are “in-between” the action. Divorced physically from their position within a narrative structure, these paintings become abstract, ambiguous and open ended as to the unknown events which have preceded or may follow.


Image of the video documentation of Though floating on water, a group exhibition including work by Emii Alrai, Simeon Barclay, Wang Pei, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ingrid Pollard.

Video:

Though floating on water

Exhibition documentation:

Though floating on water

Emii Alrai, Simeon Barclay, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Wang Pei, Ingrid Pollard.

Workplace

50 Mortimer Street

London, United Kingdom

5 September – 4 October 2025

Workplace is pleased to present Though floating on water, a group exhibition including work by Emii Alrai, Simeon Barclay, Wang Pei, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ingrid Pollard.

The exhibition will reimagine the relationship between the body and the landscape, questioning inherited ideas of ownership, history and belonging. Through a diverse set of practices including photography, sculpture, installation and painting the exhibition will reflect upon how history, and representation shape our understanding of our land and our space within it.

Though floating on water investigates who is visible, who is remembered, and the material traces that remain. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the novel Season of Migration to the North by the prolific Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, author of Maryud, the novel for which Ibrahim El-Salahi’s illustrations were produced.