Watching the City

RHODES is excited to present Watching the City, a new series of original oil paintings by award-winning portrait painter Morag Caister. About Bringing together a group of sitters from across the creative world, the exhibition considers the experience of looking at other lives, and the distance that exists between one person and another. For Caister, portrait painting is a way of making the world stand still, if only for a moment. Working from in-person sittings at her Brighton studio, she observes each sitter closely, considering not only their appearance but the space between them. The resulting paintings become an encounter between two perspectives: the sitter looking back at the artist, and the artist attempting to understand a person whose inner world can never be fully known. This sense of distance is central to Watching the City . Caister approaches the city as an observer, looking towards the lives unfolding around her with affection, curiosity and a sense of longing. There is a particular intimacy in watching lives that are not your own, imagining what lies behind the windows, faces and gestures encountered every day. At the same time, the act of looking invites comparison: the persistent question of how other people live, and whether their experience might somehow be different from our own. The portraits hold this tension between separation and connection. Each sitter exists as an individual, distinct from everyone around them, yet their experiences remain recognisable. Caister’s pared-back compositions give little space for distraction, directing attention towards the person and the act of looking itself. Through subtle shifts in pose, clothing and colour, she considers what can be understood through observation, and what remains inaccessible. The sitters are drawn from across the creative community, including artists, designers, gallerists and others working within the arts. While each is encountered as an individual, Caister’s approach resists the conventions of the formal portrait. Stripped of context, the figures become less about who they are publicly and more about the experience of being seen. Watching the City reflects on the strange proximity of life in a city: the feeling of being surrounded by people while remaining entirely separate from them. To look at another person is to glimpse another world, but never to enter it completely. In Caister’s portraits, that distance becomes the space in which the encounter takes place. Morag Caister (b. 1994, UK) is a British painter recognised for her emotionally charged portraiture. She rose to national prominence after winning Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year , leading to a commission to paint Sir Lenny Henry. Her work has been exhibited at major UK institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts, and is held in prominent public and private collections such as the National Portrait Gallery and Soho House. In recent years, Caister has received significant critical acclaim. She was awarded the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize in 2023 and was shortlisted for both the Contemporary British Painting Prize and the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award in 2024. She also emerged as a candidate for Forbes 30 Under 30: Europe in Art & Culture and was named one of thirty creatives in the Evening Standard’s Art Power List 2023. In 2026 she was invited to the prestigious La Brea Studio artist residency in LA, and her work is set to be featured at Art Basel Miami this December. Read more Toggle Painting