Two new exhibitions are coming to York Art Gallery – featuring an immersive experience and international art prize.
Contemporary artists Squidsoup and Liz West are set to exhibit a range of immersive works at York Art Gallery in a brand-new installation entitled Future Tense: Art in the Age of Transformation, running from Tuesday 19 September 2025 to Sunday 25 January 2026.
Squidsoup is an artist collective who create immersive digital installations utilising light, sound, and space. Their interactive installations often explore the relationship between technology and human perception.
Submergence, one of the displays coming to the York Art Gallery, was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2015 and has been exhibited on six continents.
It features over 8,000 individually suspended LEDs providing a sensory experience unfolding over a 12-minute rotation.
Liz West, another Aesthetica Art Prize finalist, also uses light and colour to create rich, immersive, and interactive displays. Her installation draws primarily on mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton’s experiments with light refraction through prisms.
Titled Our Spectral Vision, and commissioned by the Natural History Museum, the work creates a vivid immersive environment that mixes luminous colour and radiant light using a mixture of LED lamps and dichroic glass in the form of seven prisms.
Running throughout the autumn and winter of 2025, Future Tense is an exhibition dedicated to celebrating contemporary artists, presented alongside the Aesthetica Art Prize throughout the ground floor of York Art Gallery.
Alongside Future Tense, The Aesthetica Art Prize returns to York Art Gallery from Tuesday 19 September 2025 to Sunday 25 January 2026.
Celebrating its 19th anniversary, the Prize supports the work and creativity of a wide range of incredible contemporary artists, all working across different art forms and attracting national and international attention and prestige.
25 of the shortlisted works, ranging from paintings and sculpture to photography and digital art forms, will be displayed at York Art Gallery this autumn. The Aesthetica Art Prize aims to capture the diverse range of materials and media used by artists in the 21st century. Many of the pieces featured focus on themes of identity, culture and place in a global context.
These include artist Àsìkò’s focus on migration and cultural memory in his series New World Giants, Hussina Raja’s STATION, an exploration of South Asian and Caribbean cultures in the London landscape, as well as The Object, Pen with Tattoo, The Portrait and The Vinyl, an audiovisual installation by Joanne Coates (UK House of Commons Election Artist for 2024) depicting working-class landscapes in the rural Northeast of England.
Both exhibitions are included in general admission which can be booked in advance on the Gallery’s website.
