Juggernaut

Juggernaut

Bringing together works spanning more than fifteen years alongside new, never-before-seen work, Juggernaut presents a potent and timely exhibition by Phil Illingworth. Featuring drawing, drawing and painting in the expanded field, sculpture, and film, this body of work marks a compelling evolution in Illingworth’s practice—yet retains a clear and urgent thread that runs through it all: a profound unease with the social and political forces shaping our lives.

The title, Juggernaut, refers to the colossal deity-bearing chariot—under the wheels of which, legend has it, devotees hurled themselves in ritual self sacrifice. In Illingworth’s hands, it becomes a metaphor for the overwhelming systems, ideologies, and collective delusions to which individuals are blindly devoted, or by which they are unflinchingly crushed.

This exhibition follows on from Illingworth’s 2016 solo show Apocalypso, which unfolded in the immediate wake of the Brexit referendum. The echoes are intentional. Now, his work channels a deepening sense of dislocation and helplessness in the face of growing injustice and division. Again naming this latest exhibition after one of its own central works, Illingworth emphasises the inescapable forward motion of these forces—the juggernaut that flattens nuance, resists resistance, and demands reflection.

Juggernaut is both a reckoning and a call to witness: an immersive, multi-disciplinary experience that asks what we sacrifice, knowingly or not, to the relentless machinery of modern life.