Lull’d In These Flowers
Soho Revue is pleased to announce Lull’d In These Flowers, a group exhibition curated by Vittoria Beltrame and inspired by the dream-laden landscapes of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Opening on the 14th of January and running until the end of February, the exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, and installation to transform the gallery into an immersive environment that explores the blurred boundaries between reality, enchantment, and the unpredictable forces of nature.
Featuring works by Alicja Biała, Lise Bouissière, Gill Button, Fuchsia, Lydia Hamblet, and Gala Hills, the exhibition draws its title from Oberon’s incantation through an invocation of the natural realm as a scene of spells, mischief, and metamorphosis. Each artist responds to the play’s atmospheres through their own visual language, conjuring moments of humour, desire, fragility, and the uncanny. In doing so, the artworks evoke the liminal world Shakespeare envisioned, one where human emotion becomes entangled with the wildness of the natural world.
Creating a sense of continuity throughout the exhibition is a subtle spatial intervention, moss quietly infiltrates the gallery, creeping across surfaces and softening architectural edges. This organic presence, an artistic reclaiming of the built environment, echoes the play’s motif of nature asserting itself over human intention, suggesting tenderness, unruliness, and the quiet persistence of growth. The living installation, paired with Lise Bouissière’s sculpture suspended at the centre of the room and Alicja Biała’s bronze wall-sculptures, establish a sensory threshold that invites visitors to surrender to the environment, stepping into a dream state where the familiar becomes strange and the natural world gently reclaims its ground. Alicja Biała’s wall-based work extends this gesture, allowing human-made, nature-inspired sculptural forms to occupy the negative spaces of the gallery walls, mimicking the way untamed vegetation slowly overcomes its surroundings.
The paintings on display range from the intimate, fantastical, and enchanted figuration of Gill Button, Fuchsia, and Gala Hills to the vivid, colourful abstractions of Lydia Hamblet. Together with the sculptural installations by Lise Bouissière and Alicja Biała, each deeply rooted in natural forms, the works offer multiple entry points into the exhibition’s themes. As they interact within the space, they weave a narrative in which characters, landscapes, and emotions appear to shimmer between worlds, mirroring Shakespeare’s exploration of illusion, playfulness, and the porousness of the human psyche.
Visitors are invited to engage with the exhibition not only by navigating the space in a linear way but also by drifting, pausing, and circling through the room, moving among the natural interventions as the play’s characters might wander through the enchanted forest. In this environment, the act of looking becomes a gentle choreography, encouraging viewers to inhabit the dream with the same curiosity and openness that animates Shakespeare’s magical forest.
Text by Vittoria Beltrame.