Painting with Wool

THE TAPESTRIES OF MIRIAM SACKS

LONDON EXHIBITION

Monday 2 March - Friday 27 March 2026

Sworders are delighted to present ‘Painting with Wool: The Tapestries of Miriam Sacks’, a one-woman retrospective exhibition in our London gallery. Staged in partnership with the estate of Miriam Sacks, the exhibition showcases the finely honed skill and aesthetic diversity throughout the maker’s long career.

We are thrilled to showcase a curated selection of tapestries and other works by the celebrated artist. The works on view are generously loaned from the estate of the artist, with several examples to be auctioned in our highly anticipated spring Design auction, which takes place on 21 April 2026.

Join us weekdays from Monday 2 March until Friday 27 March 2026, from 11am to 6pm, at our Cecil Court Gallery. No appointment is necessary.

“The texture of threads has a much more tactile quality compared to paint and an inner quality of tangibility interwoven with the painting aesthetic. I call it ‘the tangible quality of the intangible’ felt deep within at the time.”

Miriam Sacks

1922-2004

Miriam Sacks (1922–2004) was a South African–born British textile artist and painter whose work bridges fine art and craft. She earned an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town before moving to London in 1946 to join her husband, Ian, who was studying to be a surgeon. In 1951, she relocated to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she began painting and ran a children’s art school, deepening her engagement with education, culture, and the visual arts.

A formative visit to New York in 1956 where she encountered ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ tapestries prompted Sacks to explore tapestry as a primary medium. She developed a distinctive, experimental approach to making “woven images”, using needle and thread with the freedom and expressiveness of a painter’s brush. Drawing on her experiences in Africa, her cultural heritage, and wider social concerns, her work moved fluidly between figuration and abstraction, informed by her love of nature as well as her studies in anthropology and music.

In 1962, Sacks held her first one-woman show at the Lidchi Gallery in Cape Town. Two years later, she returned to London and went on to exhibit widely over the following decades, including at the British Embassy in Washington, DC (1966), Ben Uri Gallery (1969), Kettle’s Yard (1970), the Royal Festival Hall (1971), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1971, 1973), the South African National Gallery (1972), and on several occasions at Leighton House (1977, 1981, 1985, 1988). Her work has been exhibited regularly alongside leading British ceramicists including Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, and Bernard Leach, and also celebrated weavers such as Peter Collingwood.

Supported by significant cultural figures such as Maxwell Fry and Herman Wouk, her work is now held in collections across the UK, the US, South Africa, Israel, Zimbabwe, and Canada. Beyond her artistic practice, Sacks was a prolific essayist and a dedicated collector of material related to her life’s work, much of which continues to inform the understanding of her legacy.