David Shrigley features in 'Joy'

Group exhibition ‘Joy’ explores heightened emotional states such as ecstasy, euphoria and pleasure through experiences including laughter, dancing and protest. Co-curated by Laurie Britton Newell and George Vasey as part of Wellcome Collection’s ‘On Happiness’ season, many of the works in the exhibition explore joyful experiences as a way of releasing tension and helping to mitigate the impact of stress in the body. Including new artworks by Harold Offeh, Amalia Pica and David Shrigley, the presentation explores themes of resilience, humour and hope. These commissions will be shown alongside contemporary artworks and historic objects that focus on different paths to joy and its interconnection to sorrow, demonstrating how we might move beyond the over-simplistic concepts of ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ in order to create a more complex understanding of emotion.