There is a particular kind of collision that happens when a song lyric leaves the song behind. A phrase written for a melody acquires another life on a canvas, in a sculpture, or through an installation; its meaning loosens from the music and becomes available to someone else.
This autumn, Paul McCartney is giving 61 artists exactly that opportunity. For the third edition of Sound & Vision, a fundraising project organised by War Child UK and AOAP Projects, McCartney has chosen a single line from “Band on the Run” as the starting point for a new body of work:
“Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun”.
The artists have been invited to interpret the lyric however they wish. Their responses will be exhibited at Iconic Images Gallery in London before being offered in an online auction, with proceeds supporting War Child’s work with children affected by conflict.
The choice is characteristically cinematic. The sentence seems to contain its own weather system: violence, brightness, falling, impact. It belongs to a song released more than half a century ago, yet it is being handed to artists working in a very different cultural and political landscape.
Among those responding are Genieve Figgis, Alvaro Barrington, Joshua Donkor, Sanya Kantarovsky, Aleah Chapin, Anne Rothenstein and George Underwood, alongside a broad group of established and emerging artists working across painting and visual art.
Figgis, whose exuberant and deliberately distorted paintings have made her one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary painting, has spent much of her career taking familiar art-historical forms and unsettling them. Barrington works across painting, sculpture, textiles, installation and performance, bringing together a visual vocabulary shaped by personal and cultural histories. Donkor’s richly layered figurative paintings investigate identity, ancestry and memory, moving between private histories and broader diasporic narratives.
Kantarovsky, born in Moscow and now based in New York, approaches painting and sculpture with a different kind of instability. His work often combines dark humour with psychological unease, creating scenes in which relationships seem simultaneously intimate and strange. In 2026, he is presenting Basic Failure at Palazzo Loredan in Venice, alongside work in the group exhibition Don’t have hope, be hope! at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Chapin, winner of the National Portrait Gallery Portrait Award, is known for paintings that confront conventional ideas about the body, intimacy and ageing. Born in Washington State and based in Los Angeles, she has built an international reputation for work that is both physically direct and deeply human.
Rothenstein, a former Royal Academician, is known for intimate portraits and interiors whose apparent quietness often conceals a considerable psychological charge. Her work is held in major British collections, including the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery.
Then there is George Underwood, whose connection to music history is unusually intimate. Underwood knew David Bowie from childhood and went on to create several of the musician’s most recognisable album covers, including Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. He also contributed to the inaugural Sound & Vision in 2024, when the project took its inspiration from Bowie.
The line-up extends considerably beyond those names. Matt Bollinger, Fletcher Sibthorp, Sunkyung Baek, Chloe Barnes, Colin Murphy, David Hamilton, Elizabeth Dimitroff, Helena Minginowicz, Mercedes Lucy, Nana Wolke, Nick Grindrod, PJ Houghton, Ralf Kokke, Salvatore Fiorello and Zoe Hawk are among the other artists contributing to the project. Across the wider group are artists exhibiting in and around some of the major international exhibitions and institutions of 2026, including the 61st Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Wien, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Tang Contemporary Art in Beijing.
The project has its own small history by now. The first Sound & Vision was built around a lyric by David Bowie, reflecting his long relationship with War Child. In 2025, Kate Bush supplied the creative prompt for the second edition, which raised more than £140,000 for the charity.
McCartney’s connection to War Child reaches back even further. In 1995, he joined Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Steve Cradock, Steve White and Carleen Anderson as the Smokin’ Mojo Filters to record a new version of The Beatles’ “Come Together” for HELP, War Child’s landmark album supporting children affected by the war in Bosnia.
Eight years later, McCartney contributed an alternate version of “Calico Skies” to War Child’s Hope, supporting children affected by the conflict in Iraq. More recently, he curated a selection of singles for a limited-edition 80-disc 7-inch Singles Box Set and donated one of the rare sets to War Child for auction.
Sound & Vision therefore has the quality of a long-running conversation rather than a one-off celebrity intervention. McCartney supplies the lyric; artists translate it into another medium; the resulting objects are sold; the money returns to children whose lives have been shaped by war.
That final part of the equation is increasingly stark. War Child works across thirteen countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, including active conflict zones such as Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. Its programmes encompass mental-health support, education, protection and emergency assistance, with the organisation continuing to work with children after the immediate crisis has disappeared from the headlines.
At the exhibition’s centre, then, will be a sentence about rain and sunlight, but around it sits a much darker reality.
For Gemma Peppe, curator of Sound & Vision and founder of AOAP Projects, the artists have approached the lyric with a mixture of seriousness and play. “The artists from the 3rd edition of Sound & Vision have had a lot of fun with Paul McCartney’s lyric, “Well the rain exploded with a mighty crash…”.”
The setting for the physical exhibition is Iconic Images Gallery on Waterloo Place, whose own archive is steeped in the visual mythology of popular culture. The gallery represents photographers whose work has documented fashion, film, music, politics and royalty, and holds substantial collections relating to figures including Bowie, Elton John, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
The exhibition also arrives at a moment when the relationship between music and visual art feels particularly natural. Album covers, music videos, stage design and performance have long blurred the distinction between the two disciplines. Sound & Vision simply makes the exchange more literal: a lyric becomes the brief, and the artists decide what happens next.
There is also something appropriately open-ended about McCartney’s chosen sentence. It does not describe a fixed image so much as a transformation. The rain crashes; the world changes; suddenly there is sun.
What 61 artists make of that moment remains to be seen.
written by Alexa Wang
Sound & Vision 2026
Iconic Images Gallery
16 Waterloo Place
London SW1Y 4AR
Exhibition: Friday 6–Sunday 8 November 2026
Private View: Thursday 5 November 2026, 6–9pm, by invitation
Online auction: Tuesday 27 October–Thursday 12 November 2026
Auction closes: 15.00 BST / 10.00 EST
Register to bid: https://aoapprojects.indy.auction/soundandvision
Artists
Abigail McGinley; Aleah Chapin; Alex Hanna; Alexandra Beteeva; Alice Kettle; Alvaro Barrington; Anaja Hvastija Gaia; Andrew Maughan; Andrew Torr; Anna Pakosz; Anne Rothenstien; Carl Randall; Charlie Billingham; Chloe Barnes; Christina Niederberger; Colin Murphey; David Harrison; David Rhys Jones; David Hamilton; Diana Copperwhite; Elizabeth Dimitroff; Elizabeth Power; Ellie Cotton; Emma Tod; Fletcher Sibthorp; Genieve Figgis; George Underwood; Georgie Huxley; Gill Rocca; Grace Lee; Graham Fink; Heidrun Rathgeb; Helena Minginowicz; Holly Rowett; Jenni Hiltunen; Joseph Black; Joshua Donker; Marcelle Hanselaar; Marcus Cope; Matt Bollinger; Matthew Clifton; Max Renneisen; Megan Rea; Mercedes Lucy; Nana Wolke; Natalie Wadlington; Nick Grindrod; Peter Messer; PJ Houghton; Ralf Kokke; Salvatore Fiorello; Sanya Kantarovski; Sophie Ruigrok; Sunkyung Baek; Tahnee Lonsdale; Victoria Cantons; Xingxin Hu; Xu Yang; Zoe Hawk.
