The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the Market
A Summer Celebration of Art.
Experience a selection of works from the RA Summer Exhibition 2026 suspended from our iconic Market roof this July and August.
This Summer you can experience some of the artworks from The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in a new way – suspended from the roof of Old Spitalfields Market.
It’s a new way to engage with work from a mix of artists ranging from experienced RA members to emerging young artists.
The art can be viewed seven days a week, free of charge, as you stroll the stalls or enjoy some street food.
Find more information on this year’s exhibition and artists here.
Samuel Levack is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, collage, film, installation, performance, poetry and music. His current practice centres on ceramic poetry.
Paulina Olowska is an artist whose work is deeply engaged with the political and social histories of Eastern Europe, American consumerism and pop culture, feminism, and the aesthetics of fashion advertisements. This painting is from the artist’s series ‘Mother’ and depicts model and activist Anja Rubik as mother witch from a play by the Polish writer and artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.
Liam Fallon is an artist who lives and works in London.
Tim Foxton is an artist who lives and works in Chester. His website describes this artwork as ‘Clown shoes left perfectly in place, as if their owner was suddenly launched into the air by the springs.’
Kevin Francis Gray was born in Armagh, Northern Ireland and now lives and works in Canterbury and London, UK, and Pietrasanta, Italy. The sculpture reflects on a figure that exists between states and worlds – something emerging from within the material and drawing on a sense of passage.
Cornelia Parker CBE is well known for her large scale, often site specific, installations. Now and Then features a large glass negative of silver hot water jug. Placed over the negative is a real glass water jug. By shining light through both glass objects, their shadows are combined.
Sikelela Owen was born in London she lives and works in Essex and London. Ideas of community, intimacy, and authenticity are central to her practice. Owen creates loose, layered figurative paintings that foreground the subjects and communities comprising her lived experience and memories of growing up with family in Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and America.
Gillian Wearing studied at Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths College. She won the Turner Prize in 1997 and, in the same year, her work was included in Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts: an exhibition of Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. Her work is characterised by an engagement with the lives of others and her own family history. This photograph is part of a series that Wearing created between 1992-93 where she went around London and asked people to reveal their innermost thoughts and then photographed them with what they had written.
Bill Woodrow‘s work is characterised by his use of domestic and urban objects to make sculptures in which the original identity of his materials is still evident.
David Shrigley OBE is a British visual artist.
Lindsey Mendick‘s work challenges the male gaze, promoting instead an unapologetic, humorous and, at times, grotesque femininity. She works predominantly with clay, a medium that is often associated with decoration and the domestic, subverting these historic connotations to create skilled monuments to ‘low culture’ and the contemporary female experience.
Stephen Chambers flower works were made during the first Covid year. On the first Saturday of each month a bunch of seasonal flowers would be bought at the weekend market, put into a vase, and painted. “The ordinary is more extraordinary than the extraordinary”
Sir Frank Bowling OBE relentlessly pursued a practice which boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. Ambitious in scale and scope, his dynamic engagement with
the materiality of his chosen medium, and its evolution in the broad sweep of art history, has resulted in paintings of unparalleled originality and power.
Ragnar Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums, creating video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings that draw upon myriad historical and cultural references.
Liam Gillick is a New York based artist known for contributions in sculpture, video, architecture and text.
A Summer Celebration of Art
See the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition works at Old Spitalfields Market throughout July and August 2026 and visit the exhibition in full at The Royal Academy until 23rd August 2026.
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