The Raw and the Cooked, Saatchi Gallery

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The Raw and The Cooked, Satchi Gallery, London 2026

All photos credited to Daniela Denyer Malo

7 August – 11 September 2026

"The Raw and the Cooked" opened with a promise: eleven contemporary artists channeling medieval tradition to interrogate our own age of spiritual uncertainty and political upheaval. It is ambitious, and unevenly, but not without reward, the result mostly delivers on it.

The exhibition splits into two registers. The first room speaks the language of the present, with gestures towards social icons, beautiful and intricate techniques of creation, and even stained-glass panels reworking the visual grammar of devotion into commentary on institutional power.

A "POLICE" sign rendered in the leaded glass and saturated colour of a church window, a raised hand caught mid-gesture beneath it, provokes a sharp feeling, borrowing the authority of sacred imagery and pointing it at an entirely secular anxiety. Nearby, a painted floppy disk repurposes Superman as a meditation on unchecked power, captioned bluntly: "Godlike. Unchecked. Just like Big Tech." These were some personal favorites.

It's not subtle, and it isn't trying to be: the collision of obsolete tech nostalgia with a very current worry about who governs the ungovernable lands.

The second room is where the show asks more of its audience, and where I think it's more likely to lose some of them. Here the "medieval" is not a visual reference but a working method: string and thread pulled taut across circular panels into ghostly portraits, a woven tapestry banner in the manner of a Renaissance profile, roughly built cardboard turrets, assemblages of leather and found objects hung from a metal beam like something excavated rather than made. The description of this exhibit itself is explicit about the artists’ intention: a "cultural shift away from the digital and a return to the physical world of the handmade."

That's a real and worthwhile question to put in front of a 2026 audience saturated with AI-generated imagery and work: what do we lose, and what might we recover, when work insists on the flawed and the raw?

Where the show fails for me is in not fully trusting that question to do its own work.

Craft varies significantly across the room. Some pieces read less as "raw" in the deliberate, art-historical sense the curation wants, and more as simply unresolved, even closer to primary school art studies than to finished statements.

That's a curatorial issue as much as an artistic one. When "handmade imperfection" is the operating thesis, the exhibition needs to make the case piece by piece, explicitly conveying that what we're looking at is intentional roughness rather than roughness, full stop. Not everything here fits that concept equally well.

What does work, and what I'd congratulate Harry Jones London for, is internal consistency. Whatever you think of either room individually, each is coherent on its own terms. The pop-facing works share a confidence and a point of view; the medieval-facing works share a commitment to process and material, even when execution wobbles.

It is truly the kind of curatorial beauty that is easy to overlook and harder to pull off than it looks. A show that let its weakest pieces sit beside its strongest, indiscriminately, would be a worse show than this one.

What's less resolved is the connective tissue between the two rooms, the thread that's meant to make "raw" and "cooked" feel like one larger piece rather than two disconnected exhibitions under the same title.

Is it medievalism as a lens for reading our own instability? But perhaps the show would benefit from trusting its audience to sit longer with that tension, rather than letting the two rooms read as sequential rather than in dialogue.

Still, there's something in between the lines here, particularly for anyone interested in where craft and contemporary anxiety currently meet. "The Raw and the Cooked" is not a flawless exhibition, if that could ever be said about art, but it's a much needed breath of fresh air in the current climate of the world.

It is somehow willing to let its own thesis about imperfection extend, messily, to itself.