Lightroom is making some ch-ch-ch-changes and welcoming in an exhibition on a Starman to its quarters.
The allure of David Bowie’s sparkling musical career will never stop being examined across various forms of media. Though it might be a slightly newer phenomenon, it was only a matter of time before the Starman hit the all-encompassing experience spaces, and he is set to become the latest cultural icon to have his work the subject of a Lightroom exhibition.
David Bowie: You’re Not Alone has just been announced, and it’s due to hit the space in just over two month’s time, when it promises to capture visitors by placing them at the centre of a Bowie concert.
David Bowie: You’re Not Alone
Like previous exhibitions at Lightroom, such as its debut show David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), you can expect a 360-degree projection of images as part of a film onto the cube-shaped room. In this iteration, the immersive space will play its David Bowie film at each session, showing off rare footage, as well as clips that place you in the centre of a crowd at his concerts.
It’s come to life through its director, Mark Grimmer, sifting through Bowie footage, photography, drawings, lyrics, personal notes, and audio recordings in the archives, which he had access to for leading the design for the recently unveiled David Bowie V&A collection. He was given authorisation by the David Bowie Estate, with whom he has worked alongside to create this fully-realised body of work that will soon pour over lovers of the Starman at Lightroom.
Plus, since it’s all about the music at the end of the day, you can look forward to each track being carefully reconfigured to work with Lightroom’s specialised audio system, making it a multi-faceted exhibition that takes you from his early material all the way up until 2016’s swan song, Blackstar.
Speaking on the announcement of David Bowie: You’re Not Alone, its director, Mark Grimmer, said: “It says something about our relationship with artistic heroes that we’re drawn to mystery, otherness, the alien… In Bowie’s case, this is our construct, not his.
“Throughout his career, Bowie repeatedly resisted being figured as anything but human. Rather than undermining his mystique, we designed a show to celebrate Bowie as a champion of human creativity – focusing on the message he expressed time and again: that art, in all its forms, is our best hope for understanding what it means to be alive.”
‘David Bowie: You’re Not Alone’ runs at Lightroom (12 Lewis Cubitt Square, N1C 4DY)between April 22 and June 28, 2026. Find more information at the Lightroom website, with tickets on sale from 7pm today (February 10).