MK Gallery announce plans to host trio of exhibitions in 2026

Milton Keynes Gallery have announced they will present three major exhibitions by artists whose work encapsulates the spirit of the 20th century in 2026.

The gallery will be hosting the largest solo exhibition of British painter Euan Uglow in 40 years, an exploration of iconic French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s use of colour and the biggest career survey of L. S. Lowry in fifty years to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.

Visitors to MK Gallery will have the chance to enjoy Uglow’s obsessive painting from life, Lartigue’s ground-breaking experiments with the photographic image and the full range of Lowry’s subjects and techniques.

An Arc from the Eye is an exhibition of Euan Uglow’s work and will run from Saturday 14 February to Sunday 31 May 2026.

Curated by Catherine Lampert, this landmark exhibition brings together over 70 paintings and drawings by Euan Uglow and includes nudes, still lifes and landscapes, many seen in public for the first time in many years. Renowned for his methodical systems, Uglow was meticulous in painting from life and often took months – sometimes years – to complete nudes and still life paintings in his studio. The artist also painted landscape scenes of Europe in the summer, many of which will be exhibited at MK Gallery in 2026. This retrospective of Uglow’s work will place the artist in dialogue with those who inspired him, including Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti, and his tutors at the Slade School of Art in London, William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers.

Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour runs from Saturday 20 June to Sunday 4 October 2026.

Best known for his black and white scenes of Parisian society during the Belle Époque, Jacques Henri Lartigue was a pioneer of what later became known as street photography. Lartigue captured an age of innovation in the early twentieth century on camera, documenting car racing, aviation and early tourist resorts on camera. This exhibition – the first in the UK in over ten years – focuses on a little-known and rarely seen aspect of Lartigue’s work and explores his lifelong experimentation with colour. The exhibition brings together more than 150 prints, photographs and unique works on paper from the 1900s to the late 1980s that shine a light on Lartigue’s innovative use of colour photography.

This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue, Ministère de la Culture, France and diChroma photography.

L. S. Lowry is then to be celebrated at the gallery from 24 October 2026 to 28 February 2027.

Fifty years after the death of Laurence Stephen Lowry in 1976, this will be the much-loved painter’s first major exhibition in over a decade. In addition to his well-known scenes of industrial life, this significant overview explores the full breadth of Lowry’s subject matter, including portraits, seascapes, early academic studies and enigmatic later works recalling Surrealism. Lowry’s career ran alongside huge changes in British society, with much of the industrial landscape he depicted closed, cleared and replaced during his lifetime. The artist’s technique involved just five colours of undiluted oil paint: ivory black, vermillion, Prussian blue and yellow ochre; his use of flake white as a background colour is synonymous with Lowry’s landscapes.