How Do We Find Love?

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Our autumn 2026 season will explore the profound complexities of human relationships, desire, and intimacy.

Love has always been one of art’s great subjects but is rarely its most seriously examined. This season moves beyond romantic clichés to explore love through encounters which are sexy and seductive; bodily and emotional; symbolic and intellectual. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, moving image and sound, the exhibitions continually return to the same unresolved questions: what does it mean to be loved, and to love well?

Together, the exhibitions propose that art is the sharpest tool we have for thinking about intimacy. At a moment when human connection is increasingly mediated by screens, How Do We Find Love? asks audiences to sit with love’s complexities and contradictions: as wound and remedy, as sacred and profane, as private and political.

The Last Human Kiss

13 November 2026 – 11 April 2027–
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The Last Human Kiss explores how the kiss has shaped human ideas of love, intimacy, devotion, betrayal and belonging, and traces how artists have returned to the kiss as a way of thinking about human connection and condition. The exhibition features representations of the kiss between two people from historical representations to its digital and beyond-human expressions in the 21st century. ‘The First Kiss’ lingers in the fragile space where attraction becomes attachment and strangers become companions; ‘The Divine Kiss’ explores the Baroque fascination with love’s power to disrupt; in ‘The Social Kiss’ intimacy reflects political or collective dynamics; ‘The Romantic Kiss’ explores desire’s euphoric charge, while ‘The Trickster Kiss’ brings us to the present, where kissing takes on mediated, digital, and post-human forms, at once everywhere and strangely absent.

Spanning painting, sculpture, photography and film, the exhibition features work by Anthony Van Dyck, Auguste Rodin, William Blake, Tracey Emin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Shilpa Gupta, Sophie Barber, Patty Chang and Dorothy Cross.

The Last Human Kiss is curated John Kenneth Paranada, formerly Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre.

Image: Sonia Boyce, Mm…, 1995. © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS Images

Ecstasy and the Aftermath

13 November 2026 – 11 April 2027
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What does it mean to love and be loved in return? Reflecting on how deep connections are formed, broken, remembered and mourned, this exhibition asks whether love ever truly ends.

Moving beyond the themes of private desire and heartbreak, the exhibition reframes love as a subversive force for change and a way of building the world anew. Selected artworks address how identity, self-worth and a sense of belonging are negotiated within contemporary culture and society. Works by such artists as Jonathan Baldock, Bex Wade, Somaya Critchlow, Vanessa Raw, Dyana Gravina, Judy Chicago, Marina Abramović and Ulay and Phoebe Boswell give voice and visibility to LGBTQIA+ communities and trans care networks and engage intersectional feminist politics.

Ecstasy and the Aftermath is curated by guest curator Huma Kabakci, in collaboration with Vanessa Tothill, Curator of Transhistorical Narratives at the Sainsbury Centre.

Image: Ithell Colquhoun, The Tree of Veins, 1940-41. Copyright of the artist. Courtesy: Tate

Love Stories

19 December 2026 – 30 May 2027
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Love Stories is an exhibition of photography that explores love as it shapes our everyday lives. Bringing together the work of ten internationally acclaimed photographers, the exhibition moves beyond traditional romantic narratives to reveal intimate stories of friendship, family, partnership, community and selfhood, capturing the complex mix of mundane, humorous, painful and joyful emotions at the heart of human relationships.

Works on show range from Richard Billingham’s series documenting the lives of his parents, Ray and Liz, in their flat in England’s Black Country, to Martin Parr’s sardonic Bored Couples, exploring how individual assumptions and context influence how we interpret photographs. shown for the first time in the UK, Akihito Yoshida’s tender series documents the relationship between his grandmother and her grandson, the photographer’s cousin, Daiki. A series of striking self-portraits by Zanele Muholi reclaim Black identity, while Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh’s Lovers Revisited presents an intergenerational dialogue celebrating queer love and visibility.

The exhibition also includes work by, Masahisa Fukase, Ollie Adegbayo, Isabel Okoro and Carol Allen-Storey.

Love Stories is curated by Tafadzwa Makwabarara, Curator of Cultural Empowerment at the Sainsbury Centre.

Image: Ollie Adegboye, Theo Collard-Peters, London 2022. Copyright and courtesy of the artist

The season is accompanied by a book published by the Sainsbury Centre with Artworld Projects, which features new art historical texts by Huma Kabakci, Tafadzwa Makwabarara, John Kenneth Paranada and Vanessa Tothill and an interview between Rosy Gray and artist Seyi Adelekun. The book also includes creative writing by Victoria Cantons, Chantal Powell, Bea Prutton and artist duo Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser) as well as a newly commissioned short story by celebrated author Oyinkan Braithwaite.

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