Amid the heady rebellion of London's Young British Artists, Rabble Stone, a photographer, meets the artist, a painter, after renting a room in her Brixton home.

Amid the heady rebellion of London's Young British Artists, Rabble Stone, a photographer, meets the artist, a painter, after renting a room in her Brixton home. Soon Rabble is in thrall to this new world: to the run-down glamour of the Victorian house; to the exhilarating and debauched gallery openings, and to those in the artist's orbit, beautiful and lost. Above all, she is drawn to her new friend's work; raw, unfiltered self-portraits of startling intimacy, which Rabble captures in her uncompromising photographs. But as Rabble's longing tips into obsession, her pursuit of the artist - her fame, her wealth, her life - threatens to consume her.

Travelling from London to Algiers, to Berlin and New York, Exhibition is a story of love, ego and destruction, and the dark relationship between authenticity and celebrity, artist and muse.

Details

ISBN13: 9781803514130
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 256
Edition:
Publication Date: 06 Oct 2026
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.6(H)x13.8(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

ALEX HYDE is an Associate Professor at University College London. Her first novel Violets, a fictional reimagining of her father's story, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. She lives with her family in South London.

Reviews

Exhibition is, in an intriguing way, a love story...as it recounts how two women, seemingly fated to be together, lose and then find each other again over the years and across continents. It is both sensuous and sordid, and utterly immersive * Spectator *
The novel interrogates with subtlety how much self-portrait might be collaboration... [Exhibition] gathers force in a dramatic conclusion... Steady, quiet, delicately suggestive * Financial Times *
Lyrical and dazzling... [Told] with extraordinary clarity, concision and intrigue * Esquire *
Rich and devastating * AnOther Magazine *
Intense... In spare, compelling prose [Exhibition] captures the fever of the exploding Young British Artists scene, as well as the complex dynamics of attraction, possession and competition... Hyde deftly explores friendship, fame and the ambiguities of artistic collaboration and ownership * Bookseller *
Absorbing * Art Newspaper *
Sharp, vivid, compelling: a love letter to the last identifiable scene in British Art that captures the energy, grit and luxury and hunger of 90s London -- Lizzy Stewart * author of Alison *
A brilliant, daring novel, about art and devotion and infatuation. I love the way Hyde sneakily inserts well-known artworks into her fiction. But most of all I love the hypnotic rhythm of the language, laced so skilfully with internal rhyme -- Sara Baume * author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither *
Alex Hyde never wastes a word, but her sparing language conjures up a visually rich world in which she explores the complexities of female friendship across boundaries of class, success and creativity -- Caroline Walker
At once tough-as-nails and brittle, unflinching and tender, the formidable characters that inhabit the pages of Exhibition come to life vividly through Alex Hyde's crisp and elegant writing. This exquisite book will stay with me for a long time -- Melanie Vandenbrouck
A thoroughly enjoyable read, the style of writing makes it pacy, I loved making the connections and recognising the artworks and artists I know, as well as a sideways reference to myself, as a tramp at an opening! -- Gavin Turk
A short, sharp shock of a novel: Exhibition is a vivid portrait of two artists as young women that plunges us into their mutual obsession and creative co-dependency with a charged, poetic force. In allowing us to peer through her unique lens, Hyde tears up the traditional artist-muse boundary and prompts us to ask enduring questions about class, gender, and the art world. I loved it -- Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Exhibition is precise and poised - simultaneously unsettling, obsessive and vulnerable. For anybody first-generation in the arts, Hyde perfectly pinpoints that mapless sense of being adrift in the artworld - the discovery of art as a tool, a hiding place, a language of desire - in all its grit and hunger -- Anthony Shapland
A gift of a novel. With sharp, surgically lyrical prose Hyde captures the intoxicating and obsessive nature of what it is to make art. A perfect snapshot of the energies that drove the most electrifying period in British art -- Tom de Freston
A compelling dramatisation of celebrity as viewed from the wings * Daily Mail *
Elegant... [A] feeling of melancholic reflection, of abundant futures concertinaed into the inevitability of the present, suffuses Exhibition and is its primary achievement * Guardian *
[Exhibition] depict[s] art as a thing that happens between people, the work as membrane * TLS *
Writing in an unadorned, accessible style, Hyde richly evokes both her characters and their milieu... The book's prescient denouement is a chilling nod to a whole new world * Irish Times *
A vivid recollection of a life amid the Young British Artists in 1990s London * Radio Times *
Fascinating study of the making of an artist... More than that, however, it's about the value of friendship, fame and remembrance * Marie Claire *
Breathtaking... [Alex Hyde] has an artist's eye; the prose is rich with sumptuous descriptions * Literary Review *