Contemporary art done well - for a change

Expressions in Blue at Petworth House reviewed in the Brighton Journal by Leisan Beaumont

Expressions in Blue Petworth House stops you before you even reach the door. The first thing you see is the obelisks.

Two soaring columns of cobalt blue porcelain standing on the lawn before Petworth House — monumental, impossibly vivid against the pale stone facade and the wide Sussex sky. Your first instinct is a simple, wordless question: how did they get here? How did something so enormous, so fragile, so extraordinary end up standing in a 17th-century English park as if it had always belonged?

That question — of belonging, of scale, of the impossible made real — follows you through the entire Expressions in Blue Petworth House exhibition. And it never quite resolves. Which is exactly as it should be.

The Obelisks — Outside

Standing on the Capability Brown lawn at dusk, the two blue obelisks are genuinely startling.

They are tall — reaching several metres into the evening air — and painted in deep cobalt blue with brushstrokes of extraordinary energy. From a distance they read as architectural, almost like columns from another civilisation. Up close, the surface reveals itself: loose, gestural, alive with movement. The brushwork is expansive and physical, applied with horsehair brushes that leave traces of the making process visible in every stroke.

The Capability Brown landscape — designed to feel natural, unhurried, eternal — absorbs them completely. They look like they grew here. They look like giants who simply decided to stop and stay.

This is the opening statement of Expressions in Blue Petworth House — and it is an unforgettable one.

Inside — Porcelain Meets Baroque

If the obelisks outside are dramatic, the interior of Petworth House takes the breath away entirely.

The Carved Room is one of the most extraordinary rooms in England: gilded Grinling Gibbons wood carvings covering every surface, Old Master portraits stacked floor to ceiling, candlelight from chandeliers overhead. Into this space, Aylieff has placed her monumental vessels — towering fencai-enamelled forms painted with exuberant floral decoration in vivid greens, pinks, yellows and reds.

The contrast is not clash. It is conversation.

The vessels draw on Petworth’s own magnificent collection of 17th-century Chinese porcelain — and yet they are entirely contemporary, entirely Aylieff’s own vision. Standing among them in the Carved Room, surrounded by centuries of accumulated artistry, you feel something rare: the sense that a genuinely new work has found its rightful place in a very old story.

The private view itself had the atmosphere of discovery — guests moving slowly between rooms, stopping before each work, champagne in hand, the murmur of conversation mixing with the sound of footsteps on oak floors. It felt less like an opening night and more like a quiet revelation.

The Verdict

Expressions in Blue at Petworth House is one of the most ambitious and quietly magnificent exhibitions in the south of England this year.

The combination of Aylieff’s monumental porcelain with Petworth’s baroque grandeur creates something neither could achieve alone. The works belong here — and yet they arrive as something entirely new, asking the house to look at itself differently.