White Cube at Claydon

Designed by craftsmen from England and Italy as a grand declaration of the Verney family’s status and wealth, the opulent 18th-century interiors of the house move through Rococo, Palladian and Chinoiserie styles with uniform splendour. Claydon’s ground floor speaks openly of the family’s proximity to power, nowhere more so than in the imposing Saloon, which enshrines the family hero Sir Edmund Verney, who died at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642 defending the standard of King Charles I. Van Dyck’s likenesses of both king and courtier now gaze upon Cai Guo-Qiang’s five-panel gunpowder painting Heaven Complex No. 1 and No. 2 (2017), a sensuous vision of paradise lost, conjured in a single detonation of coloured gunpowder, then partially obliterated by another.

After the measured neo-Palladian grandeur of the Saloon, the lavish woodwork of the North Hall, designed under the unbridled creative direction of virtuoso carver Luke Lightfoot, seems to press against the limits of its own ornament. Rachel Kneebone’s porcelain sculptures appear to gather and stack the room’s rococo flourishes into delicate structures on the verge of collapse, while the sinuous forms of Nigerian-British painter Tunji Adeniyi-Jones echo the singular authorship of Lightfoot’s exuberant invention, while drawing on influences as disparate as William Morris and Yoruba body ornament.

Typical of the English country house, Claydon’s compendium of interior styles reflects a cross-continental appetite that extends from French Rococo and Italianate neo-Palladianism into exoticised visions of the East. The contemporary works both celebrate these histories of cultural exchange and comment on the exploitative legacies of colonial extraction on which such opulence was founded. El Anatsui’s bottlecap sculpture in the Pink Parlour, which has echoes of chainmail or ceremonial drapery, is composed of countless anonymous heads in profile that coalesce into a single larger silhouette, reading less as a celebration of individual glory, perhaps, than as a reminder that such wealth is founded on the labour of many. Upstairs, in Claydon’s Museum, repository of the family’s military regalia as well as curios gathered from the far corners of the Empire, Danh Vo presents a luxury-brand suitcase housing the limbs of a priceless wooden putto, offering a pointed reflection on the movement of valuable objects across borders, both sanctioned and not.

Built to dazzle and awe, Claydon’s staterooms give way on the upper floor to a more intimate register. Serving as an intermediary between the floors, Enrico David’s stargazing figure Aurora (2025) cranes towards the lantern crowning the magnificent Black & White Hall, inviting our gaze to follow. Retaining a measure of grandeur and formality, the upper rooms nevertheless concede to the more private histories of Claydon’s former residents. In the Great Red Room and Garland Chamber, works by TARWUK and Cinga Samson keep company with enigmatic ancestral portraits. Among them is the melancholic Margaret Denton, depicted with hair loose, a closed portrait miniature about her neck and bearing scars of unknown origin on her arm, who finds a counter-portrait in Samson’s tenebrous and symbolically charged Ukunambuzelelwa (2024). In the bare Paper Room, so called as the home of the family archives, the twin chandeliers of Cerith Wyn Evans’s son-et-lumière work Mantra (2016) emit intermittent flickers of light and tentative piano notes, as though tuning in, mediumistically, to the past.

The histories of Claydon’s women, though less visibly commemorated than those of its men, trace a powerful lineage of endurance: marriage in early adolescence, childbirth and bereavement, of repeated efforts to save the house from ruin and seizure, and, in the especially sad case of Mary Abel, of madness, for which she was kept in confinement and denied access to her children. At the far end of the upper floor, the former bedroom of Florence Nightingale, who visited regularly between 1857 and 1890, now houses works by Mona Hatoum, Julie Curtiss and Tracey Emin that draw on a surrealist language of the domestic to uncanny effect. Handcrafted garments fashioned from human hair by Hatoum and Curtiss hang alongside Emin’s embroidered vision of a nightmare, transfiguring the bedroom into a site of psychic intensity.

In the Chinese Room, Lightfoot’s decorative exuberance reaches near-anarchic heights. Conceived in the manner of a traditional Chinese tea house, the room’s window bays house three sculptures by Raqib Shaw, whose writhing hybrid human-animal figures are spiritedly in keeping with the room’s beguiling chinoiserie, while paintings by Curtiss and Minoru Nomata extend the mood into scenes where the familiar appears to have slipped its moorings, making wry allusion to the room’s many displaced curiosities. Danh Vo’s photographic flower portraits in the Gothick Room, meanwhile, encode their own histories of cross-fertilisation and exchange. Hand-annotated with their Latin names by Vo’s father in the tradition of a botanical encyclopaedia, and installed en masse, they serve to both frame and conceal the room’s original features.

From the estate’s vast parkland, Tracey Emin’s declaration in neon I Loved You Until the Morning (2025) frames the house’s façade, casting the glow of daybreak upon Anselm Kiefer’s spectral figure in white, whose work extends into the Fernery, where the glass vitrine sculpture Rapunzel (2016) appears given over to time and proliferating plant life. Summoning the unhurried pleasures of a long summer afternoon, David Altmejd’s sprightly ‘Nymphs’ (2025) gather in a loose bacchanale on the South Lawn, while Virginia Overton’s immersive wind chime installation and Gabriel Orozco’s clover-shaped reimagining of the classic ping-pong table invite interaction and collective play. Isamu Noguchi’s seated yogic figure Zazen (1982/84 (2022)), distilled in folded bronze plate, meditates at the far end of the Nightingale Garden.

Throughout the grounds, Marguerite Humeau, Richard Hunt, Theaster Gates and Antony Gormley mobilise metal into forms of commanding stature and ambition. Engaging with processes of growth and transformation, Humeau’s Rise (2021) monumentalises the microscopic event of pollination in the grape flower, extending tentacular tendrils across the pool garden, while Hunt’s Revealing Growth (2022) draws on the upwards thrust of a branching tree in testament to the progressive momentum of the Civil Rights Movement. This assertion finds a poignant counterpart in two bronze vessels by Gates at the far end of the lawn, which honour and preserve the legacy of ceramics as a medium historically used to demarcate property lines and sites of burial. The vista that frames them was created by the second Earl’s removal of All Saints Church graveyard, an act of landscaping regarded as desecration by the congregants. At the end of the avenue of yew in the Upper Garden, Gormley’s massive columns of stacked cast iron describe two bodies in a relationship of mutual support, turning the materials of industry and architecture into an expression of vulnerability and closeness.

Beyond the neutral premises of the contemporary gallery, Claydon offers a more complex site of encounter. Conceived equally as a grand public statement and as a private home, it bears the annotations of time, incident and accumulated history. Here, the artists and makers of the past, the cherished objects and passing fashions intermingle with the concerns and narratives of today; the historic encountered as though newly made, the contemporary as the relics of future ages.