London Gallery Cancels Matthew Collings Exhibition After Antisemitism Objections
A planned exhibition by British artist Matthew Collings (b. 1955) at Delta House Gallery in London has been canceled after UK Lawyers for Israel raised objections to drawings that had already stirred controversy in Margate. The show, titled “Drawings Against Genocide,” was scheduled to run May 16–24 at a gallery space within Delta House Studios.
The dispute centers on imagery from the earlier Margate presentation, which drew sharp criticism from the Telegraph, whose review described the work as “dripping with Jew-hate.” The Jerusalem Post reported that one drawing depicted Sotheby’s owner, French-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi, eating babies alive, while others showed Jews as devils with horns or standing on skulls alongside the phrase “we love death.”
UK Lawyers for Israel pressed for the London cancellation after the Margate version of the exhibition became a source of public controversy. Tom Berglund, chairman of Pineapple Corporation, which owns Delta House, said the exhibition had been arranged without consultation with the owners of the artist studios at Riverside Road. “We all hope the issues on the ground in the Middle East can eventually be resolved,” he added.
Collings responded on Instagram, disputing the characterization of the drawing said to reference Drahi. He wrote that the work’s “critical point” was satire aimed at “whitewash[ing] Zionist atrocity,” and added: “Zionism is not Jewishness.”
The cancellation places Collings’s work squarely in the fraught overlap between political satire, antisemitic imagery, and the limits institutions face when exhibition content becomes a public flashpoint. In London, as in other art capitals, the question is no longer only what an artist intends, but how a work is read once it enters the public sphere.
