This summer, Saatchi Gallery turns its gaze upwards with The Sun and The Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial, a major new exhibition exploring how the two great bodies in the sky have shaped art, science, myth, ritual, fashion, spirituality and the human imagination. Opening on 5 June and running until 8 September, the show unfolds across two floors and nine gallery spaces, arranged as a journey through a full 24-hour cycle: from dawn to daylight, sunset to moonrise, and finally into the strange, luminous depths of night.
DAWN TO DAYLIGHT
It begins, appropriately, with Dawn. Here, the Sun and Moon appear not as distant astronomical objects but as deities, forces, omens and symbols of power. Historical artefacts sit alongside contemporary works, including Annelie Solis’s Signorum and Lian Zhang’s dreamlike paintings ‘Above the Clouds’ and ‘Coming Home’, in which vast golden celestial faces hover over dragons, deer and surreal little landscapes. The effect is part fairytale, part cosmology, part very chic fever dream.
MAXIMUM SUNLIGHT
From there, ‘The Sun Rising’ turns towards time, rhythm and ritual: the way the Sun has long governed agriculture, seasons, celebration and the daily business of being alive, and in ‘Zenith’, the exhibition moves into the high heat of the day. This is the room of sunlight on skin, summer rituals, holidays, fans, eyewear and the ancient human compulsion to turn one’s face towards warmth and behave slightly differently. Yinka Ilori’s Sun and Water Can Live Together offers a burst of graphic optimism: hot pink, orange and yellow over rippling blues.
Then comes ‘Setting Sun’, where the mood changes. The light lowers, the symbolism deepens, and the exhibition leans into transformation, reflection, alchemy and astrology. Catherine Nickford’s The Solar Lunar Accord (An Alchemical Cosmology) is here: dense, black-and-white, occult, intricate, with sun and moon faces, celestial diagrams, skulls, figures and symbols arranged like the contents of a mystic’s filing cabinet during Mercury Retrograde.
THE SUN AND THE MOON
At the centre of the exhibition is Helios, Luke Jerram’s six-metre sculpture of the Sun. Internally illuminated and created using detailed imagery drawn from NASA observations, it is both scientific and marvellously theatrical: a colossal glowing sphere suspended in the gallery, its surface alive with sunspots, filaments and solar texture. It is a blockbuster moment, certainly, but also a strangely tender one. The Sun, usually too bright to look at directly, is brought indoors and made available for contemplation.
INTO THE DARK
As daylight fades, ‘Evening’ shifts the focus to the Moon: its phases, its observation, its place in literature, photography, science fiction and the collective human tendency to stare at it and become poetic. Saad Qureshi’s large-scale split moon will be suspended from the ceiling, while other works explore lunar imagination in its many forms.
‘Walking on the Moon’ turns to the human urge to get there, featuring Margo Selby’s Moon Landing, a vivid textile installation created in collaboration with composer Helen Caddick, where weaving, mathematics, rhythm and colour are treated as languages capable of speaking to one another.
By Midnight, the exhibition has entered the witching hour. This is the Moon of dreams, folklore, magic and myth, the Moon that causes poets, lovers, insomniacs and anyone with a tarot deck to become suddenly emphatic. Works by Paula Rego, Joan Miró, Joseph Wright of Derby and Marguerite Carnec explore the Moon’s stranger pull, where rational observation gives way to ritual, superstition and the feeling that something just happened in the garden.
The journey concludes in Darkest Hours with teamLab’s bewitchingly immersive installation Massless Suns and Dark Suns.
The Sun and The Moon follows the Gallery’s Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture as the second in its series exploring how the natural world inspires creativity. This time, the subject is larger, stranger and rather harder to pin down: the Sun and Moon as gods, clocks, calendars, moods, mirrors, navigation systems and, naturally, inspiration for excellent jewellery.
It asks us to look again.
