LONDON.- Dulwich Picture Gallery announces the addition of new contemporary works to its free-to-access Sculpture Garden this summer, featuring artists Laura Ford, Laura Ellen Bacon, Conrad Shawcross and Surbhi K. Modi. The sculptures join a growing programme of installations across three acres of green space, which was newly transformed into a contemporary Sculpture Garden in September 2025 as part of the Gallery’s largest redevelopment in over 20 years.
Since its launch, the Sculpture Garden has continued to evolve, with rotating installations by leading contemporary artists, inviting visitors to experience art in the landscape while connecting to the Gallery’s historic Collection.
Laura Ford’s new addition to the Sculpture Garden, My Little Marini, 2020, offers a witty and subversive reinterpretation of Marino Marini’s famous Venetian modernist landmark, The Angel of the City, 1948. While Marini’s original sculpture overlooks the Grand Canal in Venice with an assertive expression of masculinity, Ford’s smaller, reimagined figure shifts the narrative entirely. Transporting the subject into the domestic world of children’s gymkhanas and My Little Ponies, Ford adorns the horse with ribbons and rosettes, playfully emasculating the animal in a bid for control. Featuring a rider facing away from the direction of travel echos this disoriented gesture, serving as a comic depiction of a stalemate.
Laura Ellen Bacon’s The Assembled, 2026, draws inspiration from Sir Peter Lely’s Nymphs by a Fountain, early 1650s, echoing the painting’s careful staging and the intimate grouping of figures. Bacon creates five curving, interwoven structures made from willow and wooden posts that bend, overlap, and appear to lean into one another. Their bundled forms are reminiscent of bodies tipped into slumber, fixed yet gently swaying, as though reaching toward the shelter of a nearby tree. The sculpture invites visitors to consider how natural materials, like painted figures, can be arranged, assembled, and bound into a shared moment of stillness.
Suspended among a tree within the Sculpture Garden, Conrad Shawcross’ geometric forms entitled Optic Pendants, 2026, cast shifting patterns as daylight changes. The lantern sculptures refract and scatter light, encouraging visitors to notice the interplay between natural illumination and Shawcross’ engineered structures. The works create a poetic dialogue with the Gallery’s historic architecture, as the world’s first purpose-built top-lit museum.
In June 2026, the Gallery will install a sculpture by multi-disciplinary artist Surbhi K. Modi, offering visitors a welcoming space to pause, gather, and connect within nature. Songs Under the Same Sky (The Rock Bench) references the Neo-Hinduist philosophy of peace and tolerance. Featuring two mountain-like forms accented with clusters of golden brass bananas, it transforms the familiar bench into a site of rest, conversation, and shared experience. The piece responds to still-life traditions, particularly the Vase with Flowers, c. 1715, by Jan van Huysum in the Gallery’s Collection.
Jennifer Scott, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “Our Sculpture Garden has become a place where art and nature meet. We continue to work closely with contemporary artists whose works encourage us to look again - at our Collection, our architecture, and the natural world that surrounds us.”
The new sculptural installations will be on view throughout the year in the free-to-access Sculpture Garden, offering visitors fresh perspectives across the seasons. They join existing works on loan by Makiko Harris, Nika Neelova, Harold Offeh, Li Li Ren, Tai Shani and Amy Stephens, alongside Collection works by Peter Randall-Page and Rob and Nick Carter.
