Running until 12th March 2023, Charleston, the legendary farmhouse located in the South Downs National Park in East Sussex, near Lewes, features an exhibition exploring sexuality, desire, liberation and gender. This exhibition follows a recent show Dior Homme inspired by Charleston.

The stunning works of leading contemporary artists Somaya Critchlow, Harold Offeh, Kadie Salmon, Tim Walker (who was the subject of a spectacular retrospective at the V&A a few years ago), Alison Wilding and Ajamu X are brilliantly juxtaposed with the explicit and gorgeous watercolours of Duncan Grant. The show is intimate yet impressive.

Spanning the full spectrum of media, from photography, installation, drawings and video, the pieces depict scenes of love and pleasure. Drawn during the 1940s and 50s when sex between men was still illegal in England, Grant’s private drawings were recently rediscovered making this exhibition a fantastic opportunity to engage with the artist’s incredible talent. In 1959, Grant gave the dossier full of these drawings to a friend with a special handwritten note featured in the below video. The note read: “These drawings are very private – please give them to Edward Le Bas, to do what he likes with them.” Over the next 60 years, the folder passed from Le Bas, an artist and collector, along “a wonderful chain of queer men” Clarke says, becoming imbued with a “mythic quality”.

Charleston was after all the home and studio of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and in many ways a place for sexual liberation and freedom. “It is where they came together to imagine society differently, and has always been a place where art and experimental thinking are at the centre of everyday life.”

While Tim Walker’s installation, where muscular men engage in lovemaking, takes centre stage, other highlights in the show include large-scale photos by Ajamu X, a Brixton-based analog photographer and activist who celebrates black queer bodies and differences. He is the co-founder of rukus! Federation and the award-winning rukus! Black LGBTQ+ Archive and a leading specialist in Black LGBTQ+ history, heritage, and queer cultural memory in the UK. The artist was recently featured on the cover of Frieze magazine.

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