Physical Culture offers a more mischievous incentive. At Nottingham Contemporary, Augustas Serapinas has built an exhibition you are expected to enter with your whole body. Among the art exhibitions 2026 worth travelling for, this is one where looking almost feels insufficient.
Physical Culture offers a more mischievous incentive. At Nottingham Contemporary, Augustas Serapinas has built an exhibition you are expected to enter with your whole body. Among the art exhibitions 2026 worth travelling for, this is one where looking almost feels insufficient.
August 19, 2026
Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas has turned two of Nottingham Contemporary's largest galleries into an unlikely hybrid of sculpture studio, running track and functioning gym. Running from June 6 to September 13, with the next gym session on August 19, Physical Culture is his first institutional solo exhibition in England.
The machines genuinely work. Their weights, however, look as if somebody raided an art academy before leg day.
Jesmonite sculptures replace conventional iron plates: Michelangelo's David, the Apollo Belvedere, reconstructed student exercises, portraits, an earthworm and even an alien enter the machinery. Serapinas developed the original idea while studying in Vilnius in 2012, connecting the repetitive discipline involved in learning classical drawing and sculpture with the equally repetitive project of constructing the body at the gym.
That makes Physical Culture particularly strong as one of the art exhibitions 2026 worth travelling for. Its interactivity changes the intellectual argument.
Visitors can encounter the installation through live workouts, personal-training sessions, life drawing and community wellbeing activities. The equipment becomes activated by actual bodies, while other participants may sketch those bodies nearby. Nottingham Contemporary has even scheduled one-to-one sessions with personal trainers inside the gallery.
Suddenly David is no longer simply an ideal body to admire. He can become part of the weight another body struggles to lift.
Serapinas takes centuries of Western art's obsession with proportion, physical perfection and the heroic nude and places those ideals inside contemporary fitness culture, another system obsessed with measuring, refining and displaying the body. The museum and gym start looking unexpectedly related: both have mirrors, rituals, unwritten rules and very strong opinions about what a desirable body should look like.
The Nottingham edition also embeds itself in its host city, incorporating local references and activating the work with Nottingham fitness groups, university students and community participants.
This is why travelling for Physical Culture makes sense. Photographs can show the eccentric machines. Video can show somebody using them. Neither reproduces the slight absurdity of standing inside a gallery where the distinction between artwork, audience and workout keeps collapsing.
You come expecting to see sculpture. Serapinas may have you doing reps with it. And that is exactly why Physical Culture deserves top spot on the list of art exhibitions 2026 worth travelling for: Who doesn't want to do 5 sets of curls with David dumbells?
