London's Design Museum opens "Es Devlin: Other Worlds" on Friday, a retrospective spanning roughly three decades of work by the British stage designer and artist, running through April 4, 2027. The museum describes it as her first major European survey, building on a 2023-24 show at New York's Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Adult tickets start at £17.09, with concessions from £12.82 and children's tickets from £8.55. The show is curated by Danielle Thom and Johanna Agerman Ross, with Margherita Dosi Delfini, and fills the museum's main galleries in Kensington, a short walk from Holland Park.
At its center is a circular display the museum calls the "30-Year Desk," tracing Devlin's work from small theatre productions through opera, arena tours and large public installations. Alongside it, "Archive Unboxed" presents early sketches, school notebooks, diaries and prints on a gallery wall, and a full-scale reconstruction of her South London studio — books, maquettes and working clutter included — puts her process, not only the finished sets, at the center of the show. The museum's own description of the exhibition frames it as an attempt to let visitors inside Devlin's working imagination rather than simply display its results.
From small stages to stadiums
Devlin was born in London in 1971 and began designing small-scale theatre productions before her work expanded into opera houses, arena tours and some of the largest stages in live entertainment. Her credits, detailed in a recent profile, include the set and stage design for Adele's 2016-17 world tour, collaborations with U2, Beyoncé, Kanye West and Lady Gaga, the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show. She also designed the set for "The Lehman Trilogy," the Sam Mendes-directed play that transferred from London's National Theatre to Broadway and the West End.
Two new large-scale installations extend that public-facing work into the gallery. "Come Home Again," a sculptural shrine to endangered species first shown elsewhere, reappears here in a new configuration. "Infinite Library" fills a room with books supplied by Penguin Random House UK that will be donated to local charities once the show closes, turning a gallery piece into a working lending collection for its five-and-a-half-month run.
In her own words
Devlin has described her installations as registering unease rather than resolving it:
If this confusion and dissonance is at work in my culture, my community, my city, my country, it's probably in my body and in me as well.
Es Devlin
She returned to that idea of restless change when discussing her long-running interest in transformation:
I want to make pictures like the picture of Dorian Gray that continue to change.
Es Devlin
On turning the show's focus toward her own process rather than a finished production, she said in a statement released by the Design Museum:
It is a great privilege to have the opportunity to share my working process and artistic practice with visitors and to create a new large-scale installation.
Es Devlin
The museum has scheduled a public conversation between Devlin and chief curator Johanna Agerman Ross on December 8. Her next major commission is further out: a production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle for New York's Metropolitan Opera, again with Mendes directing, set to open in 2028. Closer to home, 2026 has already brought a run of outdoor commissions, including "Library of the Four Winds" at Castle Howard in Yorkshire in June and a National Portrait Gallery installation made with Google's Arts & Culture Lab in May — evidence, as a profile published by the German Design Council notes, that the retrospective arrives mid-career rather than as a late-life survey.
"Es Devlin: Other Worlds" runs at the Design Museum in Kensington through April 4, 2027.
