Maddox Gallery proudly presents ’The Shape of Heat’, a summer group exhibition tracing colour, beauty, memory and desire through art that glows, unsettles and endures.

Conceived for the height of the season, the show brings together nine contemporary artists whose works do not simply depict warmth, but seem to hold it. Across charged surfaces, coded scripts, poolside figures, domestic interiors, future homes and dreamlike landscapes, heat is felt as much as seen. It lingers in ceremony and afterglow, in humour, appetite, stillness and restraint.

Featuring RETNA, Manuela Gallo, Dairo Vargas, INAE, Juan Cuéllar, Cooper, The Connor Brothers and Mina Alikhani, the exhibition unfolds as a dialogue shaped by contrast, with each artist creating a distinct emotional register.

RETNA’s coded scripts transform language into rhythm, surface and urban ritual, while Gallo’s poolside figures are suspended between leisure and self-consciousness, caught in the quiet pressure of being seen.

History and inner conflict shape Dairo Vargas’s compositions, poised within recollection and invention. INAE offers the show’s most luminous sense of afterheat, translating experience into colour, light and trace. In Juan Cuéllar’s architectural visions, technology, media, power and future living converge in a state of seductive disquiet.

Elsewhere, Cooper transforms everyday objects, flowers and interiors into saturated arrangements of nostalgia and aspiration, while The Connor Brothers bring humour and social friction into sharp relief through text and image. The tone shifts again in Mina Alikhani’s surreal landscapes, where forests, moons and silence carry cultural and emotional resonance.

Throughout, recurring tensions emerge between exposure and concealment, pleasure and unease, control and release. These works are not united by a single temperature, but by their capacity to hold intensity.

’The Shape of Heat’ invites viewers into a space where beauty is never passive, desire is never simple, and presence remains long after the image has settled.