Blusher: Art, Makeup, Materiality: Leicester Gallery

12 July - 6 September 2025

Leicester Gallery

De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH

Blusher: Art, Makeup, Materiality, explores makeup as a potent artistic medium, deeply entangled with identity, gender, ritual, and societal perception. Curated by artist and former makeup artist Cathy Lomax, the exhibition features works by over 40 artists—including Rose Wylie, Karla Black, and Cary Kwok—that investigate makeup’s symbolic, painterly, and transformative properties. Challenging its historical dismissal as decorative or superficial, Blusher reclaims makeup’s aesthetic and cultural significance, revealing its complex ties to femininity, commodification, and power.

On loan: Rose Wylie RA (b. 1934), Self Portrait with Shut Mouth, 2017.