Exhibitions, Installations, Vintage
Curation + Hosting by Velorose
Autumn / Winter 2025

Posters with Purpose: The Art of H A Rothholz
Tuesday 30.09.25 to Saturday 11.10.25
Daily 12 noon to 6pm
Closed Sunday

Posters with Purpose: Opening Celebration
Whitechapel Gallery First Thursdays
Thursday 02.10.25
6pm to 9pm
All welcome

Posters with Purpose: Closing Tea
Saturday 11.10.25
3pm to 6pm
All welcome

From 30 September to 11 October 2025, Velorose will host Posters with Purpose, a celebration of the pioneering graphic designer Hans Arnold Rothholz (1919–2000). Best remembered for his crisp, modernist posters of the mid-twentieth century, Rothholz - along with his friends Abram Games, Tom Eckersley and George Him - helped to shape the look of British public information and commercial design. Velorose's exhibition focuses in particular on Rothholz's designs for both the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and the General Post Office (GPO), two institutions that saw posters not as decorative ephemera but as powerful tools to inform, instruct, and persuade. These bold images feel startlingly fresh today, even as the society they were made for has transformed beyond recognition

What, then, do these posters say to us today? 70 or 80 years on, the Britain they depict has changed beyond recognition. We have safer roads, stronger workplace protection, smartphones instead of landlines, and email instead of air mail. Yet the appeal of these posters lies precisely in their combination of historical specificity and timeless clarity. As one scrolls through Instagram feeds and skims notifications, Rothholz’s posters remind us of a slower, more concentrated form of visual culture. They were designed for collective streets and corridors, factory walls and post office counters - not for personal devices. They ask us to pause, look, and think, not to swipe and move on

In addition to weekday and Saturday openings, we are hosting two celebrations at which Arnold Rothholz’s son Stephen will be in attendance, to which all are welcome

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to acquire prints of the posters, and a small number of rare originals will be available; we will also have postcard packs for sale

Are You (T)Here?: Paintings by Louis Petit from a Film by Emma Matthews and Chris Petit
Tuesday 14.10.25 to Sunday 19.10.25
Daily 12 noon to 6pm

Are You (T)Here?: Community and Collectors Celebration
Monday 13.10.25
6pm to 9pm
All welcome

D is for Distance: London Film Festival Screenings

Friday 10.10.25
6.30pm
ICA Screen 1

Saturday 11.10.25
1.00pm
BFI Southbank NFT2

Sunday 19.10.25
12.20pm
BFI Southbank NFT3

Book Here

The future is in my hands.
The journey is in my eyes
and the peanut is in my mouth

Louis Petit (2009 / aged 6)

Velorose is proud to present 'Are You (T)Here?: Paintings by Louis Petit from a Film by Emma Matthews and Chris Petit’, a solo installation of paintings by the London-based emerging artist, running from 13 to 19 October 2025. The installation will feature text written by Esme Joffe

Another in the Velorose ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ series, this installation of paintings is being staged in parallel with three screenings of the film 'D is for Distance', made by his mother, film editor Emma Matthews, and co-created with filmmaker and writer - and Louis’ father - Chris Petit. The film is part of the recently-announced 2025 BFI London Film Festival’s ‘Love' strand. Described by The Guardian as a “tender portrait of parents battling for their son’s medication”, the film and paintings together create a rare and intimate dialogue between cinema and visual art

Several of Petit’s works feature in this haunting and quietly radical film, while Matthews is both present and absent: sometimes glimpsed in profile, more often a disembodied voice addressing her son without reply. The work moves beyond family or illness to become a one-sided conversation — a mother speaking across distance, as parent and as artist

Louis’ response comes in paint. His landscapes, forged out of the hallucinatory experience of illness and recovery, resist simple description. Unfamiliar, sometimes unsettling, they are punctuated by recognisable fragments, evoking a strange homeland remembered only in glimpses. While their imagery recalls surrealism, they resist artifice: they feel discovered rather than constructed, internal worlds mapped from the inside out

Placed together, the film and the paintings form two perspectives on a single experience: the witness and the subject, the external and the internal, the question and the reply. “Are you there?” Matthews asks. In this installation of paintings, Louis answers — not in words, but in oil on aluminium

We are delighted to open the installation with a ‘Community and Collectors' celebration on Monday 13 October 2025, from 6pm to 9pm, to which all are welcome; this is an opportunity for Louis and his mother and father to thank everyone who has supported them on the journey which the film ‘D is for Distance’ and Louis’ paintings describe

Paintings and Etchings will be available to purchase

As everything turned itself inside out,
bleeding into nothing,
nothing remained as everything.

Louis (2025 / aged 22)

Golden Lane Xmas Market
Sunday 30 November
12pm to 4pm

Carthusian Street Vintage Marché
Monday 1 December to Friday 19 December
12pm to 6pm
Weekdays

As the end of the year approaches, and the nights draw in, Velorose gets cosy again with vintage goodness and gifting for December; the gallery will focus on artwork and objets d’art

In advance of our Carthusian Street Vintage Marché, we are delighted once more to be previewing the show at the Golden Lane Estate’s Xmas Market