Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

An extract from “Ring Out, Wild Bells” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Published in 1850.

‘Man Ray is best known for inventing a new photographic aesthetic. ‘I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself’ he said. He was endlessly versatile and adept across media as shown by this series of prints made towards the end of his life. They celebrate colour and form while deftly treading the line between abstraction and figuration’.

‘I love this series of strange little etchings by Hockney with its pleasing mix of marks and satisfying lines. It’s a lesson in storytelling with the sparest of details’.

‘These two works by Dale Chihuly remind me of being by the sea, calming and powerful all in one breath.  The playful and expressive marks of Sea Baskets so synonymous with Chihuly’s energetic practice in contrast to the smooth curves of Channel Mist Basket.  I imagine how the encounter of sunlight on the glass must create a dazzling effect in a home, bringing a little bit of the sea inside’.

‘I would love to have been painted by Alice Neel, to experience the tenacity and empathy of her gaze. Her portraits can be tender and cruel all in one breath and that is why I admire her work so much’.

‘When I was six my godfather gave me a big fat catalogue from the Matisse retrospective at MoMA. He told me he knew how boring I would think the present was but he made me promise I’d wait a few years and then, like magic, I would realise it was one of the best things I’d been given and of course, he was right’.

‘There is something so unapologetically joyful in Andre Derain’s woodcut. Clearly anthropomorphism is at play here – to me the vase looks like a woman with her hands on her hips and an explosion of flowers bursting out of her hair’.

‘This print, which encapsulates Miro’s inner universe, is inhabited by a litany of his favoured codes and symbols from jagged stars to wide-eyed fantastical creatures. Created in response to the Spanish Civil War, Miro communicates vivid pain with perfect brevity’.

‘Sarah Graham’s depictions of the botanical world are far from pretty and all the better for it. In Kraken, a fantastically ominous mass of tendrils spill across the paper at a vast and unsettling scale’.

‘Peter Doig’s work is laced with a dark sort of magic which is captured here in his rendering of Muldenberg with its white glazed water, pockmarked sky and strange, ghostly stillness’.

‘Aaron Kasmin’s carol singers are pure, old-fashioned joy and encapsulate the sort of Christmas we’re surely all longing for this year’.