Kate MacGarry presents The air of ideas, a pop-up group exhibition in Rye, East Sussex, bringing together a rotating selection of artists represented by the gallery. Taking place across two ground-floor rooms of an eighteenth-century house on Rye High Street, the exhibition creates a temporary setting for works by artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, film, textiles and other forms of contemporary practice. The presentation brings the gallery’s programme into a different architectural and geographical context, allowing the works to be encountered outside the conventional gallery environment.

Among the artists included are Lisa Milroy, Marcus Coates, Francis Upritchard, Mark Corfield-Moore, Rio Kobayashi, Patricia Treib and John Smith, whose practices span distinct approaches to image-making, material, perception and everyday experience. Milroy’s longstanding engagement with still life, landscape and the relationship between stillness and movement is placed alongside Coates’s interdisciplinary practice, while Upritchard’s sculptural language brings together imaginative figures and references drawn from art history, popular culture and the natural world. The exhibition also includes Corfield-Moore’s textile-based paintings, Kobayashi’s playful approach to craft and furniture, Treib’s investigations into looking and abstraction, and Smith’s pioneering work across film, video and conceptual practice.

The air of ideas offers an opportunity to encounter these varied practices within the intimate scale and domestic character of its temporary Rye setting. Rather than presenting a fixed thematic survey, the exhibition develops through the dialogue between works, artists and architecture, with the changing group of participants allowing the presentation to evolve throughout its run.