London – Step over the threshold and into The Haunting Current: "The Willows Revisited" at Bonhams New Bond Street, where over 30 international artists and 100 artworks create a vivid dialogue between the tangible and the spectral.

Running from 10 - 26 February 2025, and then with a smaller section of highlights available to view in private viewing gallery until 7 March, this exhibition offers works priced between £1,000 to £1 million, alongside never-before-exhibited loans from private collections.

Inspired by Algernon Blackwood's 1907 supernatural tale The Willows, The Haunting Current aims to transform the gallery into a quiet breach between worlds and will explore the uneasy harmony between the human and the metaphysical. The exhibition brings together diverse voices, some well-known, some rediscovered, and some still overlooked. Together, their works can be seen to speak a shared language, encouraging conversations between kindred spirits and opposing forces.

Darren Leak, Bonhams International Director of 20th & 21st Century Art, remarked: "The Haunting Current encourages audiences to step further into a realm that reveals as much about the human condition as it does about the mysteries beyond. It presses the question Blackwood left unanswered in 1907: Do we turn back, or step further into the current?"

Marina Ruiz-Colomer, Head of Department of Post-War & Contemporary commented: "This exhibition brings together artists who have occupied themselves with different facets of the human experience. They have reimagined and reinvented the way a reality can be represented; from the atomic to the cosmic in Yayoi Kusama's intricate compositions, the animalistic in Germaine Richier's convoluted forms, the bodily in Magda Cordell's raw corporeal paintings and even the frenzied in Stanislao Lepri's pictures or the mystical in Monica English's work. The Haunting Current transcends time periods and classifications to show the viewer a thread that has recurred in the human experience."

Highlights of the exhibition include works by:

• Monica English ( 1920 - 1979). An incredibly obscure artist, English is due more attention. English was a practicing witch and a pivotal figure in a Norfolk coven devoted to the Celtic Horse Goddess Epona. Her pieces are as enigmatic as was her life, blurring the boundaries between ritual, magic, and creativity.

• Magda Cordell ( 1921 - 2008) – A masterpiece for raffle ticket. Cordell, whose practice has recently been rediscovered, balances the sacred and profane in her weighty, visionary works. Exhibited is 'Android' (1958), which was originally won in the ICA 1958 Christmas raffle, it is being exhibited publicly for the first time since then.

• Carole Gibbons (1935-). Until recently little known outside of Scotland, the 90-year old Gibbons creates compositions that explore emotional landscapes, capturing moments of introspection and human connection. Her recent solo show in New York has sparked interest in her work, bringing her vision to a global audience, with Roberta Smith in The New York Times proclaiming that 'Gibbons' art will find its place in history'

• Emmy Bridgwater (1906 -1999). Bridgewater's organic forms teem with eerie vitality. Her surrealist works delve into the subconscious, merging dreamlike imagery with unsettling undertones.

• Germaine Richier (1902-1959). Richier's major sculpture La Montagne ( 1955-56) will be on view, on loan from a private collection. This is one of the artists last works. The sculpture feels like an artefact, that speaks of decay and rebirth.

3 February 2025