Olivia Sterling's 'A World Out of Joint' Opens at Charleston, Firle

Olivia Sterling brings her surreal, unsettling vision to Charleston in Firle, Sussex, in an exhibition titled "A World Out of Joint." Running from 19 September 2026 to 7 March 2027, the show places the British artist's paintings and sculptures inside the historic home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Sterling's practice transforms ordinary encounters into charged examinations of power, identity and the systems that govern daily life, using an incisive sense of humour alongside exaggerated gestures and uncanny figures. Her scenes sit between the comic and the disturbing, drawing on art history, popular culture and contemporary life to question how bodies are seen, judged and represented. Charleston's history of experimentation, collaboration and radical thinking provides the context for this dialogue, a setting where art and life have long been intertwined. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the familiar and to confront the tensions beneath its surface, resisting easy interpretation while embracing the strange. It opens 16 September 2026.