Southampton-born artist opens the newly refurbished Art Gallery
26 Feb 2026
For its opening exhibition from 7 March 2026, Southampton City Art Gallery presents ‘Levitate Me: Desire, Ecstasy and The Sublime’, a major solo exhibition of new work by British artist Emma Richardson. Spanning the entire east wing of the Gallery, the show features a striking new series of oil paintings that continue Richardson’s exploration of transcendence, eroticism, and the sublime.
Through large-scale, sensuous paintings, Richardson invites visitors into a world charged with desire, interior landscapes, and elemental forces. Using oil paint on canvas, she subverts classical techniques to conjure floating veils of light, form, and space; moments suspended between the bodily and the cosmic.
Paint is tensed, layered, and dragged across the canvas, forming succulent webs and spectral trails that suggest flesh, atmosphere, or celestial matter. In this imagined terrain, baroque intensity collides with a sci-fi dreamscape, where expansive inner worlds are rendered with raw emotion and cinematic drama.
Structured across three distinct gallery rooms, the exhibition guides viewers through the themes of Desire, Ecstasy, and The Sublime, inviting a slow and sensory encounter with the work.
Richardson draws from an eclectic and deeply personal body of research; writers such as Annie Ernaux, Audre Lorde, Miranda July and Esther Perel; the uncompromising visions of Paula Rego, Dorothea Tanning, Louise Bourgeois, and Maria Lassnig; Baroque and Renaissance painters; and her own lived experience as a touring musician, currently performing with the Pixies. Her practice investigates the politics of desire, the necessity of collective joy, and our shifting relationship with nature, offering a sensuous and poignant commentary on the inner and outer forces that shape human experience.
I Slipped My Body Completely, 2025, oil on canvas, 180x200cm, Emma Richardson
The exhibition holds particular significance in Southampton, where Richardson was born and lived for much of her life. She has selected works from the Gallery’s collection to be shown in dialogue with her own – creating connections across time and mediums. Visitors will encounter works by Ithell Colquhoun, Helen Chadwick, Auguste Rodin, and John Martin, among others – artists whose practices resonate with Richardson’s themes of the female experience, baroque ecstasy, and the sublime power of nature.
‘Levitate Me’ opens to the public on Saturday 7th March 2026 at Southampton City Art Gallery and runs until 31st August 2026.
Councillor Alex Winning, Leader of the Council, said: “We are honoured that our opening exhibition is by an artist born right here in our city. It’s great to be able to play a small part in supporting Emma Richardson’s artistic journey, alongside her successful musical career – and is just one example of the amazing talent we have right here in Southampton.”
Phil Gibby, Area Director, Arts Council England, South West, said: “This is fantastic news for Southampton – a place of strategic importance to Arts Council England, and where communities can now reconnect with their local gallery and learn from the stories and objects that shape their city. I’m especially pleased to see the re-opening marked by an exhibition from an artist who has been supported through our Developing Your Creative Practice programme.
We’re proud to have invested in the Gallery’s transformation through the Museum Estate and Development Fund, and our Unlocking Collections programme, helping to make its significant collections fully accessible to all. I look forward to witnessing the positive impacts this new chapter brings.”
Emma Richardson, said: “I’m fascinated with how oil paint, with its sensual, physical properties, can be pushed to speak not just of the outer world, but of what stirs beneath it, our complex inner worlds, the unseen emotional, erotic and psychological layers of human experience.”
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