In 1951, the Festival of Britain acted as a beacon of post-war hope, launching a landmark touring exhibition that brought world-class art to local museums and art centres across the UK. Seventy-five years later, Hayward Gallery Touring honours this legacy with Small Wonders: Reimagining British Art, a contemporary reimagining of that original vision.

The exhibition brings together 50 acclaimed artists who have participated in the British Art Show – the UK’s definitive five-year curated survey of contemporary art – since its inception in 1979. Taking inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise – a “portable museum” contained within a suitcase – each artist has created a new, small-scale work that responds to their original British Art Show presentation. The result is a condensed yet expansive overview of a half-century of British art history.

Alongside Small Wonders, there will also be an exhibition of 21 exquisitephotogravure prints of major drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe. One of the most important artists in 20th-century American art, O’Keeffe balanced abstraction with figuration and tenaciously pursued her innovative style.

The 21 drawings featured in this exhibition were made between 1915 and 1963, spanning the period when O’Keeffe established herself as a major figure in American Modernism. O’Keeffe worked with her agent and long-term friend Doris Bry (1920 – 2014) to produce this sublime collection of photogravures of the drawings, which charts key trajectories and motifs in her practice.