The demeanour, attitude, role and presence of the cat has been captured by artists as long as cats have been in our lives. Their love and their vengeance, their unwillingness to give up on their wild ways, the mayhem and calm they can be responsible for. Their unwillingness to constant easy fit, imbuing them with a character and personality that demands to be recorded. Their facets stilled and hung on gallery walls, carved, cast, constructed and set on gallery floors and pedestals, distributed on printed page, remaining reminding in artists and observer’s magpie minds.

From Picasso and his Cat Catching a Bird variations, each simultaneous depictions of feline malice and commentaries upon the onset of the cruelties of war, Baselitz and his fenced off brutish cat headed man, Balthus and Kirchner and their intimate relaxed girls with calm constant cat companions. The more innocent world of Beatrix Potter, all little people despite their fur, Louis Wain who outgrew their clothes and became barely contained electricity, Gwen John who gave them grace and poise with her delicate watercolour strokes. Karel Appel and the childlike abandon of hue and form they became, Bonnard and his perfectly elongated white cat, and of course Warhol’s brightly hued lithographed parade of gentler house trained cats. Their painted and sculpted evocations have been seen and admired, sometimes with as much urgency as their furry source.

The artists included in Cat Show also reveal their own contemporaneous considered reactions, through painted expressions, constructed forms, as they are and what they do, as characters and creatures, as loved ones sad departed. The comfort and support and the tribulations of their sharper side, made visible through eleven sets of eyes and hands. Attendants, lingerers, players, resters, fighters, whole clowders of them, their obsessions, their urges, their facsimiles, their long shadow after they have gone, our complicated relationship with what was once feral seen in unison.


Thames-Side Studios Gallery
Thames-Side Studios
Harrington Way, Warspite Road
Royal Borough of Greenwich
London SE18 5NR

Open Thursday-Sunday, 12-5pm, during exhibitions.
For general Thames-Side Studios Gallery enquiries please email [email protected]
Disabled access. Free, limited parking is available on site.

How to get here:
Bicycle: Thames River cycle path (16 mins cycle from Greenwich).
Bus: 161 / 177 / 180 / 472 to Warspite Road bus stop.
DLR: Woolwich Arsenal (1 minute walk to Plumstead Road and take Route Bus 177 towards Peckham Bus Station or 472 towards North Greenwich Station).
Road: A2 corridor, first roundabout east of Thames Barrier onto Warspite Road.
Train: From Cannon Street or London Bridge to Woolwich Dockyard (8 minute walk) or Charlton (12 minute walk).
Tube: North Greenwich (Take the Route Bus 472 towards Thamesmead Town Centre).
Crossrail: Elizabeth Line to Woolwich (take Route Bus 177 towards Peckham Bus Station or 472 towards North Greenwich Station).