Tom Phillips during the install in Gallery III (Photo : Lucy Shortis)

Starting June 8th (running until August 16th) the Royal Academy will be holding its 247th Summer Exhibition, this year curated by Michael Craig-Martin RA – a leading artist of his generation.

The Summer Exhibition is the world’s oldest open-submission exhibition, where unknown and amateur artists may find their work hung alongside pieces by household names such as Anselm Kiefer or, of course, Tom Phillips who has been a contributor to the exhibition many times since 1966.

This year, Tom has been accorded the rare honour of having an entire room (Gallery X) dedicated to his epic work A Humument : on one wall of this gallery, visitors will be able to see, in three tiers, the first forty-eight pages from Mallock’s original novel, with Phillips’s first version and final treatment of these same pages displayed beneath. The effect will be rather like a physical manifestation of our recently-installed online Humument gallery.

The central installation in Gallery X shows the continuation of the second version of A Humument virtually entire, running in page order.

A group of fine art print versions of twenty of the pages hangs on the rear wall : as they are for sale, these twenty will offer visitors to the Exhibition an opportunity to buy their own archive prints.

In Gallery III of the Exhibition and being exhibited for the first time is 'Music', a painting recently completed by Tom Phillips.

This short video, courtesy of the RA, shows the whole event being assembled in timelapse : approximately 14 seconds in, you will briefly see Tom's room in the process of being hung with rows of Humument pages.

For more details including admission times and prices, visit the Royal Academy website.

Salman Rushdie, 70 x 55cm 1993

Tom Phillips's portrait of Salman Rushdie, in charcoal mud and pastel,  incorporates a line from Rushdie's poem 6th March 1989, "Not to Shut Up, to Sing On". It features in the exhibition Great British Drawings at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford until 31st August which showcases more than one hundred works by some of Britain's greatest artists. Also on display are several pages from Phillips's Merry Meetings 

For more information, opening hours and tickets visit the Ashmolean site here.