Exhibition explores Tudor legacies in contemporary art

The exhibition, curated by Cambridge art historian Dr Christina J Faraday features works by eleven contemporary artists working across painting, digital media, video and photography, animatronics, ceramics, jewellery and silversmithing, set alongside rarely seen objects from historical collections in Cambridge.

“The Tudor period brought the advent of many ‘modern’ ideas in the realms of politics, religion, and society,” Dr Faraday says. “It also witnessed the first two English Queens Regnant, and the rise of England’s imperial and colonial ambitions abroad.

“Above all, it produced some of the most exciting and iconic images and objects in British art of any period. Many artists today are interrogating similar themes, making the era fertile ground for exploring issues of power, identity and artifice.”

The free-to-enter exhibition explores themes such as the representation of power; bodily presentation and bodily regulation; artistic responses to gender, race and ‘otherness’ within British and imperial histories; magic, technology and hidden forces, and the question of artistic artifice and art’s (in)ability to give access to ‘real’ historical subjects.

Dr Faraday says: “Artists of every age have been drawn to the Tudor period – each one finding something relevant to their own time. For the Victorians it was the first glimmerings of England’s Protestant Empire and the first strong English queen. For artists now, gender and empire are still to the fore, but complicated by more recent reassessments of themes such as identity, power and politics.” 

“In this exhibition, artists revel in the look of the Tudor period – the sumptuous materials, the jewels and costumes, but also the inventive and charismatic everyday objects. At the same time, they engage with the period’s reputation for cruelty and violence – Machiavellian politics and executions at home, and the origins of colonial and imperial atrocities abroad.

“Several of the artists are fascinated by what Tudor portraits can tell us about representations of power, and how that interacts with ideas about gender for a monarch like Elizabeth I, who was the most powerful person in the country, yet viewed as physically ‘inferior’ to the men of her court due to her sex.”

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Mat Collishaw’s Mask of Youth, an animatronic re-imagining of Elizabeth I’s ‘real’ features, seen here for only the third time in the UK since it was commissioned for an exhibition at the Queen’s House, Greenwich in 2018.

Stephen Farthing RA’s Elizabeth I: In a Field of Stars, a work made specially for this exhibition, is shown alongside works by The Singh Twins, Linder Sterling, Chan-Hyo Bae, Peter Brathwaite, Eleanor Breeze, Natasja Kensmil, Serena Korda, and Jane Partner, all of which deploy Tudor art and imagery in ways that speak urgently to contemporary audiences.

The exhibition will present the contemporary artworks alongside loans of historical works, creating conversations across time and media. Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is lending some charismatic Bellarmine jugs – bottles with grimacing bearded faces at the necks which were later recycled as witch bottles to ward off evil. The artist Serena Korda makes her own contemporary versions of these objects that explore themes of violence and ritual.

The Old Schools is lending their portrait of Elizabeth I, painted at a fraught moment in her reign when the question of whether she should marry had its last, acute airing. It speaks to contemporary works in the show which use Elizabeth’s own image to explore ideas about gender, power, race and empire.

Dr Christina Faraday is a historian of art and ideas specialising in the Tudor period. She is an Affiliated Lecturer in the History of Art Department at Cambridge. Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England, was published in 2023. Her latest, The Story of Tudor Art, was published in 2025.

She says: “I have been struck by the similarities between artists’ practices today and the experiences of Tudor artists. Artists now are often multidisciplinary, working across lots of different media and incorporating performance as well as physical objects into their works. This was also true for someone like Hans Holbein the Younger – famous now for his portraits of Henry VIII and his courtiers, but who spent most of his time designing ephemeral scenery and banners for one-off court entertainments.

“Many of the artists here reject the idea of the ‘lone genius’ artist who creates an entirely original composition; many of the artists work in collaboration with others, or incorporate elements of collage and bricolage using pre-existing materials to create new compositions – much closer to Tudor ideas about creativity, which favoured the imaginative reuse of pre-existing forms, quotations and ideas.”

The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge, CB2 1DQ

Open (free): Wednesday to Sunday, 12PM to 5PM

A programme of exhibition-related events runs alongside the Cambridge Festival.