Sara Hartland-Rowe
The Feast
6 Februrary - 8 March 2026
Fridays – Sundays: 12 – 6 pm (or by appointment)
Opening reception: Saturday 7 February, 5 – 7 pm
Prime Minister Mark Carney, Davos 2026: “…if we’re not at the table we’re on the menu.”
In 2000 I made a group of paintings called ‘Journey’s End’ that showed a group of people travelling past a desert, a mountain and two lightning bolts to their arrival at a peaceable kingdom. I made those paintings well into the 80 years of adherence to the post WW2 signing of the UN Charter that mitigated at least some of humanity’s worst impulses. I’d just had a baby, and discovering a peaceable kingdom must not have seemed an impossibility.
The current group of paintings was made as three global superpowers, Russia, China and the US are veering, in the hands of their venal, sociopathic and brutal heads of state, toward a return to the principle of super-power ‘spheres of influence’. They seem to agree that sovereign statehood is irrelevant to superpower interests. An unspoken gentlemen’s agreement between them gives Trump North and South America – and Greenland. Xi gets Asia, Putin Europe.
I don’t have any illusions that the pen (or brush) can topple palaces, but it has been cathartic to paint these chaos-mongers and join, in a small way, with the millions of others that see monstrous human behaviour and work to resist it.
In one of the paintings, Dark Feast, a ghostly face hovers over the scene. The original source was a decaying tree-stump that looked like an ancient, terrifying head. I think of this chthonic head as the earth resisting these terrible fools.
Feast 1: Trump, Xi and Putin gather around a table. They are accompanied by a blonde doll, a stand-in for Trump’s many blonde enablers who blandly lie without batting a single false eyelash
Feast 2: A feast of roast swan, fish, bread and fruit, all balanced on the back of a ram is in the foreground of the painting. The fish and bread, Christian symbols of bounty and charity, are untouched and ignored by all but the now-uncertain blonde and a mouse looking for scraps.
Feast 3, Burning Salt-cellar: Trump, Putin and Xi argue over an elaborate salt-cellar in the shape of the Earth. The salt-cellar is on fire. The blonde has given up.
Dark Feast: The three men meet in a forest, raw meat-bones at their feet. Only the blonde is aware that an ancient head is glaring down at them from the trees.
Moonlit Feast: The blonde is gone. The Earth is gone. Trump, Putin and Xi crouch on their haunches under a full moon. Black radishes, a root-vegetable remarkable for its matte, soot-black skin, are strewn around them. Angry spirits lurk in the darkness while chthonic heads glower from every tree.
The Characters
Donald Trump, with his ridiculous quiff of artificial hair
Vladimir Putin, with his predilection for naked horse-riding (is this a call-back to a Cossack past? The same paramilitary troupe that exterminated the village my Jewish great-grandfather was from?)
Xi Jinping, soberly dressed, probably the ultimate winner in this struggle because he is more ruthless leader than psychopath or malignant narcissist