The Grammar of Shapes
ArtMoorHouse 2026 curatorial theme
In recent years, our ways of seeing have shifted. Digital environments, ecological transformations and the continual overlap of physical and virtual spaces have reshaped the conditions in which forms appear. In this fluid landscape, a shape becomes more than an outline: it becomes a point of orientation, a way of reading what surrounds us.
This theme begins with a simple intuition: we do not passively receive images — we complete them. Gestalt thought revealed how the mind searches for coherence, draws connections, and builds unity from what may seem partial or unfinished. Each encounter with a form becomes a small act of construction, a quiet negotiation between perception and imagination.
Across generations, artists have returned to form as a place of inquiry. A line can open a space, a plane can carry a rhythm, a structure can reveal how perception organises itself. Contemporary practices widen this field: working with natural rhythms, digital processes or algorithmic patterns, they shape configurations that shift, contract or dissolve, inviting us to reconsider the very act of reading a form.
The Grammar of Shapes does not seek to define what a form is. Instead, it opens a space where shapes can bend, unfold and reconnect, allowing their internal logics to surface. To look closely at a form is to sense the biological, psychological and technological forces that organise our experience.
The 2026 programme invites artists, curators and audiences to approach form not as appearance, but as a trace — of relationships, underlying structures, and the changing dynamics of the present moment.
What if we learned to read forms differently? And which other structures — ecological, perceptual, social — might we then learn to imagine anew?
Programme 2026
Now showing — The Secret Language
ArtMoorHouse · Moor House, 120 London Wall · 1 October 2026 – 10 January 2027
Presented by Accorsi Arte in collaboration with ArtMoorHouse · with Elisa Campana · Alexandra Kordas · Ann Palmer · Antonino Parrimuto · Johanna Stockner
A line can hold a space open. A horizon can gather scattered colour into a landscape. A face can emerge from a meeting of contours, tonal contrasts and signs. The Secret Language brings these acts of recognition into conversation, exploring how forms become meaningful through the attention we give them.
Within Moor House, the exhibition invites a pause in the rhythms of everyday passage. Its secret language becomes perceptible through sustained looking: in the intervals between marks, the relationships between colours, and the moment when a shape begins to suggest something beyond itself.
Now showing — The Grammar of Shapes: Forms of Attention
An exhibition of sculpture by Hywel Livingstone
ArtMoorHouse Projects · The St. Botolph Building, 138 Houndsditch, EC3A · 22 September – 20 November 2026
Hywel Livingstone draws in three dimensions. Working without preparatory drawings, he develops each sculpture directly in the studio, cutting, joining and revising steel and acrylic until the work finds its own identity. Traces of this process remain visible: seams, hinges, crossings and interruptions are not concealed, but become part of the sculpture's vocabulary.
Forms meet, support and respond to one another. Steel lines bend and change direction, planes open, and flashes of coloured acrylic create visual breaks and rhythm across the structures. Familiar associations begin to emerge — a tool, a signal, a stage, a window — yet the works resist settling into a single reading.
To encounter these sculptures is to become aware of the act of looking itself. The eye travels across surfaces, follows lines and bridges the spaces between apparently separate elements, constructing relationships and continuities. Meaning does not reside in the form alone, but develops through a negotiation between what is present and what we imagine.
Presented as part of ArtMoorHouse's 2026 programme, The Grammar of Shapes: Forms of Attention considers sculpture as an evolving syntax, created through the meeting of materials, weights, colours and spaces. Form is not fixed in advance: it is discovered through making and completed, each time differently, through looking.
Hywel Livingstone is a Welsh sculptor living in Cheltenham and working between London and Stroud. He studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art before working as an assistant to Sir Anthony Caro, and later took an MA in Art History at Bristol University. He works as a conservator and technician for The Anthony Caro Centre. hywellivingstone.com
Earlier in 2026
- The Same Rain — Lee Johnson and Verity Woolley · Moor House · 22 June – 1 October 2026 · in collaboration with TIN MAN ART
- The Grammar of Shapes: Between Shapes — Olly Fathers and Stephen Jaques · ArtMoorHouse Projects, The St. Botolph Building · 10 June – 22 September 2026
- The Grammar of Shapes: Traces — Laura Medcalf, Amy-Leigh Bird and Emily Finch · Moor House · 10 March – 15 May 2026
- The Grammar of Shapes: Future Fragments — Michael Ziga · ArtMoorHouse Projects, The St. Botolph Building · February 2026
In Switzerland, ArtMoorHouse Projects presents The Weight of What Can't Be Seen by Elyzar Flores at Clinique La Métairie, Nyon, until 25 October 2026.
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Visits
ArtMoorHouse
Moor House, 120 London Wall
London EC2Y 5ET, United Kingdom
Monday to Friday, 11:00–17:00
By appointment only
ArtMoorHouse Projects
The St. Botolph Building, 138 Houndsditch
London EC3A 7DH, United Kingdom
Monday to Friday, 11:00–17:00
By appointment only
Appointments and enquiries
info@artmoorhouse.com
+44 (0)7502 211 914
+41 (0)78 203 6899