The image-making of love has arguably been the most enduring subject of art for several millennia of life on earth, wherein love is as essential to human creativity as creativity is to the human experience. Emotion has always been the most personal anchor to how we understand art, from what the artist seeks to express, to what their art evokes in the viewer, but Renaissance artist Cennino Cennini declared love specifically to be “the first item of importance in the painter’s toolbox”. As such, we understand love to not only be a feeling but also an action, something an artist can demonstrate in not only devotion to their craft but in how they seek to connect with others through a social and emotional practice of making art. ‘The Practice of Love’ looks to engage with representations of affection, intimacy, attachment, and connection in spheres of the romantic, familial, and social to examine how cultures of love are expressed in contemporary society.

Despite their transhistorical endurance, images of love continuously evolve alongside social change; dominant powers should no longer prescribe conventional images of acceptable love in heteronormativity or traditional nuclear households, where the language of love is coded to exclude certain audiences. This exhibition seeks to bring together a collection of artworks that present the beauty of variation in what the ever-changing face of love can look like to the artists and audiences of today. For many LGBTQ+ artists, creating art about queer love is an essential part of visibility when navigating social and systemic marginalisation, where the importance of representation lies not only in the affirmation of queer romantic love, but also in powerful visions of community and found families, as well as the often complex journey to self-acceptance of one’s identity. Additionally, this exhibition is deeply informed by a variety of feminist theory that redefines patriarchal notions of romantic love by analysing gendered power dynamics in the romantic union that frequently reduce the place of the woman to that of inherent dependence in a sexist objectification of love. Feminist philosophies on love instead teach love to be a conscious practice rooted in equity, respect, and a capacity for self and mutual transformation. In this way, ‘The Practice of Love’ aims to present a creative exploration of love as a social discipline, a body of arts, knowledge, politics, and actions for emotionally restoring the self and wider society.

This exhibition takes up a conscious existence amongst many troubling features of current social and political contexts, and seeks to respond to many despairs of the contemporary climate with its message of loving action. In a world so increasingly desensitised to images of suffering and injustice, experiencing the effects of political regressions into bigotry, and only intensified by the moral distances of capitalism and the hyperreal digital sphere, it is not unsurprising that audiences can find themselves falling into viewership of antipathy and alienation. In reclaiming images of love with a social meaning towards connection and community, this exhibition seeks to challenge a culture of disaffection, championing the radical capacity of loving ethics in political resistance with a distinctly human nature.

‘The Practice of Love’ was conceived with inspiration from several national and international exhibitions alongside wider cultural criticism, in particular ‘Modern Love (Or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies)’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2023), which explored the complexity of navigating love and connection in the digital age; ‘Love and Anarchy’ at the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina (2023), which drew upon the interdependence of love and conflict in visual culture, as well as ‘Love Stories’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London (2022); ‘What is Left Unspoken, Love’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022); ‘Love is Louder’ at the Bozar, Brussels (2024); and finally Norman Rea Gallery’s own ‘queer!’ (2023). This exhibition was also greatly informed by philosophies on love practice from bell hooks and Alison Jaggar, as well as the writing of Roland Barthes on the presence of love in psychological participation with art and images.