Turner's House presents new exhibition by Eileen Cooper RA & Sinta Tantra
Eileen Cooper | Deer Park, 2025 | Oil on canvas | 101 x 91.5 cm / 39 3/4 x 36 in.
TWICKENHAM.—
To mark this milestone year, Turner’s House unveils a bold new exhibition that reimagines the artist’s private world through a contemporary lens. Light is Therefore Colour brings together Eileen Cooper RA and acclaimed artist Sinta Tantra in an artistic dialogue with Turner’s Twickenham retreat, responding with site-specific work that explores memory, presence, and transformation. Complementing Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts, also on view during this anniversary year, the show explores Turner’s legacy through contemporary responses to the house he designed and built as a personal retreat.
Curated in partnership with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, the exhibition invites both artists to engage deeply with Sandycombe Lodge through painting, installation, and architectural intervention. Their work reimagines the domestic space Turner once inhabited, offering new ways of seeing his legacy through the lens of contemporary art.
“It’s rare to enter an artist’s home and feel so much creative presence still there. I’ve tried to listen to the house, to Turner, and to its many memories—and respond with a painter’s sense of wonder.” — Eileen Cooper RA
“This house holds both light and memory—my work aims to create a conversation with its architecture, using abstraction and surface to reflect Turner’s spirit.” — Sinta Tantra
“We are delighted to celebrate Turner 250 with this special exhibition. Cooper and Tantra bring imagination, resonance, and striking sensitivity to the site—connecting past and present in meaningful ways.” — Jennifer Francis, Director, Turner’s House
Eileen Cooper RA, known for her emotionally resonant, symbolist paintings, responds to Sandycombe Lodge as a space historically shaped by male presence and creative solitude. Her work introduces a powerful, intuitive energy into the house—reimagining its interiors through a lens of femininity, imagination, and myth. Figures emerge in twilight gardens; deer and symbolic forms populate dreamlike scenes that echo and soften the architecture. A glowing silhouette ascending the spiral staircase suggests quiet metamorphosis—an inward, poetic response to the house and its layered history.
Sinta Tantra, internationally recognised for her vivid geometric abstraction, approaches Sandycombe Lodge through light, architecture, and spatial storytelling. Drawing on Turner’s friendship with Sir John Soane—whose design principles influenced the house—Tantra explores celestial forms, gilded surfaces, and bold colour as ways to echo Turner’s fascination with optics and transformation. Her work responds to the building as both structure and symbol, using surface, scale, and abstraction to reimagine its atmosphere. In doing so, she brings a renewed sense of vitality to the space, positioning it as a site where historical legacy meets contemporary imagination. Together, Cooper and Tantra transform Turner’s House into a site of presence and imagination—creating bold new ways of seeing the painter’s legacy in his own home.
