Christie’s is proud to present Close Encounters: Figuration, Painting and Landscape in the Arts Council Collection, organised in partnership with the Arts Council Collection and celebrating this landmark institution in its 80th anniversary year. Open to the public at Christie’s London from 3 to 23 June 2026, this curated display brings together works by David Hockney, Vanessa Raw and Christina Kimeze to explore shifting representations of gender, sexuality, and the body through intimacy, entanglement, and the agency of the gaze.

Further works on display by Michael Armitage, Peter Doig and Suleman Aqeel Khilji consider landscape as a site of memory, displacement, and imaginative reconstruction, where place is felt, remembered, and reconfigured rather than fixed. In parallel, works by Claudette Johnson and Sonia Boyce foreground the practices of Black British women artists who have reshaped the languages of representation, offering new spaces for interiority, resistance, and play. Together, these works reflect the Collection’s enduring role as both a record and a catalyst; one that continues to evolve in dialogue with artists and audiences alike.