LONDON.- Flowers Gallery is presenting 56 in 26, marking the gallery’s 56th anniversary on 10 February 2026. The exhibition brings together a selection of works from the 1960s to the present day, highlighting the enduring relationships fostered by the gallery through artists closely associated with its founder, Angela Flowers (1932-2023). Featuring artists who began working with Angela Flowers during her early years as a gallerist in 1970s London, the exhibition offers a vivid snapshot of post-war and contemporary British art, encompassing painting, sculpture, and constructed forms.

Recognised as one of the most influential artists of his generation and a key figure in the development of Pop Art in Britain, Richard Smith CBE (1931-2016) created monumental sculptural-shaped canvases in the mid-1960s, exploring a radical new tension between volume, colour, structure, and surface in the three vivid, box-like panels of Triptych (1965). Protruding outwards as if animated, this pivotal work was first exhibited at Smith’s landmark Whitechapel Art Gallery retrospective in 1966. Alongside further historic pieces such as Bernard Cohen’s (b. 1933) large-scale acrylic Green/Blue Shape on Black (1966), the exhibition highlights works that document evolving practices and generational dialogues.

Tom Phillips’s CBE RA (1937-2022) Parc Cefn On. Llanishen – Parc Cefn On. Reflected (c. 1973) is part of a seminal body of work now included in the collection of Tate, London and is an early example of the artist’s career-long interest in postcards. Commenced in the year Phillips began working with Angela Flowers, the series is centred around picture postcards of park benches, which Phillips referred to as ‘the stationary vehicles of mortality’, upon which anonymous people sit and stroll by during their passage through life.

Prunella Clough’s (1919-1999) Swags (1993) exemplifies the acclaimed artist’s distinctive late pictorial language, in which fragments of observed reality are reconfigured through memory, abstraction, and painterly economy, situating her practice as a vital link between post- war abstraction and later developments in British painting.

Sculpture and portraiture are also present, from Nicola Hicks’s MBE (b. 1960) expressive bronze Tricky Business (1991) to Glenys Barton’s (b. 1944) refined ceramic Angela Flowers (2005), the latter underscoring the personal connections central to the gallery’s history. Barton’s further notable commissions of women include Jean Muir, Glenda Jackson MP, and Dame Joan Bakewell, all in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

London-based Tim Lewis’s (b. 1961) kinetic sculpture Die Hacke (2022) situates the exhibition’s arc in the present, recalling the process of raking and turning over soil, referencing human and industrial relationships to nature. This work also introduces ideas of miscommunication, in which Lewis describes the gestures of the mechanical creature as representing something lost in translation, as though “plucking information, such as radio signals, out of the air.”