Art

Exeter Contemporary Open returns for 2026. It forms a major highlight of the South West’s cultural calendar and a vital springboard for the careers of emerging contemporary artists. This year’s shortlist showcases the work of twelve contemporary visual artists who work across painting, sculpture, photography and drawing.

Gemma Mackenzie is an artist whose practice investigates the shifting dynamics between control and its collapse, the reversible and the irreversible, and the transitional states that occupy the space between these conditions.

Boldly experimental and famously witty, Whistler disrupted the strict conventions of Victorian society in pursuit of a new cult of beauty, creating ‘art for art’s sake’ and earning himself a place in the history of great art.