UNVEILED

21 February - 6 June 2026

In this unique exhibition, every artwork from the extensive Rugby Collection is brought together in a rare and powerful moment in the life of the collection.

The exhibition presents over 250 works spanning eight decades of modern and contemporary British art.

With works by internationally recognised figures such as Paula Rego, Lucian Freud, L.S. Lowry, Lubaina Himid and Gillian Wearing, as well as quieter, surprising works from less celebrated artists in their formative periods, this exhibition offers an encounter with a carefully curated collection like no other. 

Born in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Rugby Art Collection was shaped not by private wealth but by civic belief. The conviction that art belongs to everyone and has a vital role in public life.

UNVEILED traces post-war optimism, shifting social values and emerging voices - in a collection built on courage and long-term vision rather than fashion or fame. 

UNVEILED EVENTS

UNVEILED EVENTS

To coincide with this exhibition, we are hosting a series of Art Talks focusing on artists with works that feature in our Collection.

Join us from 6.30pm - 8pm, £5 per ticket.  Refreshments served from 6pm

Laughter and Loss: British Artists in World War Two

James Russell
Thursday 19 March

Explore the remarkable achievements of Britain's official war artists with a lecturer who has curated major exhibitions on two of them: Eric Ravilious (1903-42) and Edward Bawden (1903-89).
When Kenneth Clark set up the War Artists scheme in 1939, he hoped to employ British artists and keep them safe. In this wide-ranging lecture we follow the fortunes of those chosen, from Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Edward Ardizzone to Laura Knight, Stanley Spencer and Graham Sutherland. We will see how the experience of war inspired different artists, examine some of the striking artworks created during the conflict, and commemorate the lives of those who did not come home. 

Barbara Hepworth: Drawing and  a particular kind of 'bite'

Dr Stephen Feeke
Thursday 16 April

Being primarily a carver of stone and wood, Barbara Hepworth (1903-75) liked to draw on surfaces that had ‘bite’, which she scraped and rubbed as if they were a sculpture. Until relatively recently, Hepworth’s paintings and drawings have been comparatively neglected aspects of her practice amongst scholars and curators. Yet working in two dimensions was fundamental to Hepworth’s œuvre and she produced more than 500 examples at various moments across her career, including some of the most inventive and surprising pieces she ever made. Starting with Ruby’s Three Groups of Figures on a Pink Ground (1949), in this lecture I shall focus on some such examples from the various thematic groups Hepworth explored, including figurative life studies, abstractions and landscapes and will consider how they related to her main preoccupations and concerns.

Seeing Ways


Artist Chris Orr in conversation with Richard Davey
Thursday 14 May

Sketchbooks offer a fascinating insight into an artist’s working practice. More than a finished work, they can reveal the disparate ways an artist translates what they see or imagine into a visual language where a grammar of marks and colours stand for movement, time, space and physical presence.
Join the writer Dr Richard Davey and the artist Chris Orr RA, in a conversation that will explore this visual language and discuss how Chris’s use of it in his drawings and prints brings insights and meanings that expand and contribute to his distinctive narratives.
Dr Richard Davey is a Senior Research Fellow in Historical and Critical studies at Nottingham School of Art and Design. He is an internationally published author on art, having contributed to catalogues on Anselm Kiefer and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and written books on Tess Jaray RA, Anthony Whishaw RA and Leonard McComb RA.

Hettie Inness


In conversation with Jo Baring
Thursday 4 June

UNVEILED NEW ACQUISITIONS

The Unexpected Coast, 2026: Eric Gaskell
Linoprint

The Unexpected Coast was commissioned to mark the eightieth anniversary of The Rugby Collection, inviting Eric Gaskell to respond to a place far removed from his usual subject matter. Known for works that use coastlines as metaphors for colour, pattern and texture, Gaskell initially questioned how this language might translate to a landlocked town. Rather than resisting that tension, it became central to the work.
The composition draws on five paintings from the Collection, selected for their abstract qualities, graphic clarity and expressive use of paint. Rather than quoting them directly, Gaskell absorbed their visual languages into his own, allowing them to inform the structure, rhythm and surface of the print.
Working through repeated drawings made in and around Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, familiar architectural forms were gradually transformed. The gallery itself becomes a cliff face; steps read as shoreline; roads shift into sea. What emerges is not a literal depiction of place, but a reimagined landscape shaped by observation, memory and process.
Printed as a relief edition of eighty, the work reflects both the discipline and uncertainty of printmaking. Each sheet passed through the press multiple times, embracing variation and imperfection as part of its making. The Unexpected Coast stands as a dialogue between past and present, artist and collection, place and imagination.

Eric's print is available to buy in the shop for £80 from 20th Feb 6pm

A Place to Rest, 2025: Hettie Inniss 
Acrylic, oil, oil stick, modelling paste and pigment on linen

We’re delighted to welcome A Place to Rest (2025) by Hettie Inniss into the Rugby Collection, unveiled as part of UNVEILED: 80 Years of the Rugby Collection.
Chosen through conversations with our audiences and community - not just curatorial judgement - this acquisition reflects how the work resonates with the people the Collection exists for.
Layering colour, light and memory, Inniss explores how loss reshapes our inner worlds. Interior and exterior spaces blur, creating an unsettled yet expansive space for reflection and renewal.
See A Place to Rest for yourself at UNVEILED, opening 21 February.
 

A Place to Rest marks the first in a series of paintings from Inniss’s solo exhibition The Waiting Room, presented in Amsterdam in 2025. Here, she begins her enquiry into how memory is changed through loss. Staples of her practice are maintained within this composition: how colour performs as light on the canvas, the overlapping of interior and exterior spaces, pigments mimicking the warm and fleshy undertones of the body, and the absence of human figures. The composition places the viewer in front of a set of double doors which open out into a darkened kitchen, abstracted through shafts of light that both define and obscure the interior. 
Amongst these periods of abstraction, a second environment reveals itself. This is a view of a seemingly forested environment. The trees’ canopies weave in and out of the interior roof, while leaves cascade across the canvas and morph into different forms. Inniss explores a memory of walking through Formby Pinewoods which is triggered through touch: the heat of the sun’s rays felt through a conservatory window. However this memory has warped, and now it not only holds a loss of youth, but also a loss of a person. Rather than holding onto this sense of loss as a wholly negative experience, Inniss begins a process of marinating in its capacity for discovery and rebirth.
This is also where the artist begins to world-build, and experiment with how the realm of memory, when informed by loss, becomes both an unsettling and deeply expansive space.
 

UNVEILED VOLUNTEERING

If you are passionate about art and enjoy engaging with people we are looking for enthusiastic volunteers to be involved with the 'Unveiled Collection'