This summer, Woodbury House presents the first major survey of Swoon’s practice ever staged in the United Kingdom, and the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.

We are delighted to announce, ‘The Life of the Work’, a solo exhibition by Swoon (Caledonia Curry), opening at our flagship Mayfair gallery this July. It is the artist’s first exhibition with Woodbury House, and a landmark moment for the gallery: the first major survey of her work in the United Kingdom.

The exhibition runs from 2nd July to 13th August 2026 at Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair. On view will be thirty-six works spanning more than a decade of making, from monumental portraits reaching nine feet in height to intricate prints, cut-paper assemblages, and the most recent pieces from her ongoing ‘Sibylant Sisters’ universe.

Register your interest here.

There are artists who make work, and there are artists whose work makes things happen: in communities, in institutions, in the way people understand what art is for. Swoon belongs firmly to the second kind. Over more than two decades she has built one of the most distinctive and humane practices in contemporary art, beginning on the walls of Brooklyn without permission and arriving, entirely on her own terms, in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and Tate Modern.

Her connection to this city runs deep. She has spoken of London as her first street art love after New York, of wandering in search of the stencils and paste-ups that were only beginning to appear, and of stumbling onto Brick Lane to find what felt like an open-air gallery of the artists she admired. Banksy, she has recalled, later told her that hers were among the first paste-ups he had noticed, moved by how much had been poured into something destined to weather away on a wall.

One of the first women to gain international recognition in street art, Swoon expanded what the form could mean, not only aesthetically but ethically, opening the field for a generation of women artists who followed. Her portraiture has always been an act of witness rather than representation, bringing to the surface the people society most often chooses not to see.

That commitment has never stayed on the wall. Across post-disaster zones, communities touched by addiction, and towns hollowed out by economic crisis, she has built long-term projects that treat art not as a record of hardship but as an instrument of collective repair. She built boats from salvaged materials and sailed them down the Mississippi; she helped build homes alongside communities in Haiti; she made portraits of people in Philadelphia and the steel town of Braddock whose lives the wider world had largely overlooked. In 2015 she founded the Heliotrope Foundation to carry that work forward. In her practice the gallery and the community have never been separate worlds. They are the same world, approached with the same care.

The institutions took notice early. From a landmark commission at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, to the first solo exhibition the Brooklyn Museum ever dedicated to a living street artist, to major presentations at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Albright-Knox Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her path through the world’s great museums has been as steady as it has been remarkable. A classically trained printmaker, she has continually reinvented large-scale relief printing and intricate papercutting while expanding into painting, sculpture, installation and found-object assemblage. Most recently she has turned to long-form storytelling with ‘Sibylant Sisters’, an unfolding fiction with its own cast, plot and history, told across exhibitions, performances, books, film and an interactive Oracle Deck.

The title names a throughline. This is not a retrospective. It gathers the works that have travelled with Swoon across the whole of her practice, the pieces that have, in her own words, “ridden shotgun” with her through her entire journey: from the early street years to portraits drawn from her decades-long community projects, to the fairytale worlds of her most recent work.

The range on view runs from the operatic to the intimate. At their largest, hand-sewn mylar portraits and coffee-stained surfaces rise to nine feet, figures rendered at a scale that cannot be ignored. Alongside them hang block prints and silkscreens, works mounted onto salvaged doors and reclaimed windows that carry the memory of the lives once lived around them, drawings of great tenderness, and cut-paper assemblages that hold entire worlds in modest dimensions. Together they do not simply illustrate a career. They reveal its throughline: the consistency of a vision that has never once looked away from its founding conviction, that art belongs to everyone, that it can heal as well as inspire, and that the people most often rendered invisible deserve to be seen at the fullest possible scale.

As the artist puts it, there is a river of story running through this exhibition, from the worlds inside the images to the stories behind their making. ‘The Life of the Work’ is a rare chance to encounter that practice at full strength, gathered in a single room.

To be among the first to receive previews, news and further announcements on this landmark exhibition, register your interest now.