London’s most inspiring art exhibition: Inside Discerning Eye 2026

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The Standard’s Culture Editor on being one of the selectors - alongside Hugh Bonneville - for this year’s Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries

“On behalf of the selectors, it was a lot of fun but hard work looking at 7000 works of art over two days,” says Hugh Bonneville, delivering his speech at the packed private view of Discerning Eye 2026, “You get slightly snowblind but also very passionate and quickly detect each other’s characters. We were quick to christen Martin, ‘The Prince of Doom’…”

With the witches, skulls, goat heads, and dead birds that characterised my choices – along with a Jesus catapult – it was a title I couldn’t dispute. But this is all part of the beauty of Discerning Eye, which - for the uninitiated - is a long-running London exhibition at the Mall Galleries in which six guest selectors (King Charles was once one) choose around 120 works each from an open call for submissions. Artists from around the UK submit their works – paintings, drawings, sculptures, whatever their specialism – and its then up to the selectors to choose their favourites.

Chair Sarah Hall told the guests, “Discerning Eye is a charity that both supports artists by introducing them to buyers at the exhibition, and we also provide educational and other initiatives to support artist. It’s a selling exhibition and my understanding is Discerning Eye was timed just before Christmas in part to help artists with their income. So I like to think of this as an opportunity to do your Christmas shopping.

The unique founding concept is each selector chooses for themselves. There’s no committee coming to a consensus, each selector picks what they like from the open submission, so In effect there are six mini-exhibitions here. It means it keeps it fresh and quite different each year.”

This year there were 7000 entries to choose from, which meant the Standard was locked in a room with Hugh Bonneville and the other selectors, artists Jasmine Pradissitto and Kelvin Okafor, art lawyer Jon Sharples, and art critic Melanie Gurlis, along with the Discerning Eye team.

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