The Mountain (2023) by Mohammed Sami, was presented to the Gallery by the Contemporary Art Society with the support of Liesl Fichardt and now hangs in Room 5, as part of a display focusing on landscape. Born in Iraq in 1984, Sami deploys painting to articulate universal themes of conflict, violence and loss. Exploring the phenomenon of memory, he uses devices such as allegory and euphemism to create scenes with double meanings, leaving the viewer to make conclusions based on their own experience. Rather than presenting a conventional image of trauma to testify to the Iraq war, Sami’s semi-abstract compositions and textured handling of paint create an ambiguous space between the original event and how it might be recollected within the painting. Sami has been shortlisted for the 2026 Turner Prize for his exhibition ‘After the Storm’ at Blenheim Palace in 2024, in which The Mountain was exhibited.

Ben Nicholson’s (1894–1982) 1974 (Moonrise), is a painted relief by Ben Nicholson, was accepted by HM Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax from the estate of Angela Verren Taunt and allocated to Pallant House Gallery in 2024. . This work further enriches the collection’s representation of one of Britain’s most influential modernists. It settled £131,400 in tax and is now on display in Room 6.  A close friend and student of Nicholson in his later years Angela Verren Taunt travelled with him on working trips, as well as helping in his studio. He gifted her a number of works, including 1974 (Moonrise) and the drawing September 1956 (Siena Campanile), also joining the Gallery’s collection, as a gift from the estate of Angela Verren Taunt. Nicholson was a leading figure of Modern British art, best known for his relief work which he started to experiment in the 1930s, and this is the first of his reliefs to enter the gallery’s collection. His reliefs are celebrated as suggestions of sculpture in low relief that examine formal relationships of tone, colour, space and pattern in abstract form.

With its delicate balance of landscape, memory, and abstraction, 1974 (Moonrise)  marks Nicholson’s return to carved reliefs after a three-year hiatus, evoking the quiet beauty of a winter moonrise over Lake Maggiore in Italy. Nicholson had found lasting inspiration in the landscape there which he described ‘perhaps with a late evening moon rising beyond in a pale cerulean sky (as) entirely magical and with the kind of visual poetry which I would like to find in my painting.’