On Wednesday 29 April, the Slade School of Fine Art presents Maggi Hambling CBE as the 2026 Milein Cosman lecturer.

Hambling is recognised as one of Britain’s leading artists – relentlessly inventive in her approach to painting, drawing, sculpture and installation.  She is perhaps best known for her virtuoso paintings of nature, her psychologically acute portraits, and her often-controversial public sculpture — yet drawing has formed a constant throughout her work. To this day, she begins work every morning with an ink drawing, made ‘blind’ with her left hand, ‘like a pianist doing his scales to get into that energy and movement’.

Hambling will appear in conversation with the writer and critic (and Cosman Keller Trustee) James Cahill, discussing the ongoing and central role of drawing in her practice.  She will look back at her formative years at the Slade (1967-69) and some of the milestone exhibitions that have shaped her career.

Further details and ticket bookings here.

The Hans Keller Forum at Cambridge is now completing its fourth year. The Florens Quartet, the Juno Quartet and the Trio Musae (from the Guildhall, the Royal Northern College and the Royal College of Music respectively) are meeting in April for the third of their residencies in Cambridge, working intensively with ChamberStudio’s Director Donald Grant, pianist Alasdair Beatson and cellist John Myerscough. 

The Forum is also benefitting this year from two gifted artists-in-residence from the Slade School of Fine Art: Zainab Wood and Ayse Yardimci.

Members of the public are invited to experience the Forum at work in its open masterclasses on 14 April (reserve a place here) and closing concert on 15 April (tickets here).

The Trust is thrilled to hear that the Fibonacci Quartet has received two major awards this spring: a prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship and the 2026 Merito Award. Both awards recognise the rapid rise of this remarkable ensemble, who are now one of Europe’s leading string quartets.

The Cosman Keller Trust continues to support the Fibonaccis as the current YCAT Hans Keller Artists.

The Trust is delighted to share the news that the Elmore Quartet has won first prize in the Royal Overseas League Competition strings and keyboard division. In addition to their prize they will now play at the Gold Medal Final at the Wigmore Hall on 15 May.  Book tickets here.

The Elmore Quartet are currently Hans Keller Chamber Fellows at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. On 20 March, they will be opening this year’s Guildhall Chamber Music Festival, performing Mendelssohn’s Octet with the Vista String Quartet from the Yale School of Music, marking the beginning of a new collaboration between the Guildhall and Yale. Tickets for this concert are free — full details here.

Today sees the opening of I found the giant and he was dead, Gabriel Kidd’s new exhibition at HOME, Manchester.

For this first institutional solo exhibition since completing their MFA as the Milein Cosman Scholar at the Slade School of Fine Art, Gabriel has created an immersive work of figurative and sound pieces inspired by local folklore, landscape, erosion, and medieval notions of time.

This promises to be a remarkable experience: further information and tickets here.

The Trust is excited to announce the premiere of the second of the two new works written by Fergus Hall as part of his YCAT Composer Fellowship, which the Trust supports in memory of Hans Keller.

Adrift for solo cello, was written for the exciting Australian cellist James Morley, and will be performed by him at the Wigmore Hall on 3 March 2026.

Tickets can be booked here.

The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025-27 Milein Cosman Scholarship at the Slade School of Fine Art is Beth Simcock.

Like Milein Cosman, Beth spent her undergraduate years in Oxford, followed by further study at the Berlin Drawing Room, a residency in Japan, and an interdisciplinary residency working alongside musicians at the HQI Foundation in London.

Read more about Beth here.

The Trust is pleased to be supporting the Walker Gallery’s special Turner anniversary exhibition, exploring the enduring influence of J.M.W. Turner on later generations of artists.

The exhibition runs until February 2026: tickets can be booked here.

Step behind the scenes to see how the exhibition was created in this special video here.

The Cosman Keller Trust is very pleased to be supporting the vital work of the Amber Trust, providing musical education to blind and partially-sighted children.

Having suffered from impaired vision since childhood, Milein Cosman had a lifelong fear of losing her sight. In later life, the degeneration of her eyesight caused her increasing difficulty, but she continued to work as an artist, adapting her practice to find creative solutions to the problems of her altered vision.

For the past 30 years, the Amber Trust has helped countless children with vision impairment (and often other complex needs) develop their musical talents and fulfil their creative potential. Amber also supports the development of new teaching materials, as well as research which demonstrates the power of music to transform young lives.

2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of J.M.W. Turner.

The Trust is pleased to be supporting the educational work of the Turner’s House Trust, based at Sandycombe Lodge, the retreat that Turner built for himself and his father in Twickenham in 1813.

Working with 10 local primary schools, the Turner’s House educational programme introduces children to art and history through visits to Turner’s House and taking part in interactive museum workshops. As well as encountering Turner’s own art, children explore their local history, learn how to care for, catalogue and write about objects for display, and develop the skills to mount their own exhibition for family, friends and the local community.

The Cosman Keller Trust is excited to share the news that Tate Archive’s two-year cataloguing and digitisation project is now approaching completion.

We are grateful to all the wonderful staff at Tate who have worked so hard on this project, which ensures that Milein Cosman’s extensive archive of over 10,000 items will be preserved and made accessible to all.

To mark this significant achievement, the Project Cataloguer, Evangeline Mills, will be giving a talk, with a curated display of items from the Archive, in the Tate’s Show and Share series on Friday 14 November at 1 pm.

Tickets are free and can be booked here.

The Trust is delighted that the Astatine Trio will be joining the Elmore Quartet as Hans Keller Chamber Fellows at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama this year.

The Astatine Trio also took part in ChamberStudio’s very first Hans Keller Forum at Cambridge, and this year they returned there as Fellows, sharing their experience with the current ensembles taking part in the Forum.

The Astatine Trio will be performing Haydn and Ravel at the Guildhall’s Milton Court Concert Hall on Wednesday 6 October at 6 pm. Tickets are free and further details are here.

The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted that the YCAT Composer Fellow for 2025-26 is Fergus Hall.

The first of the two works Fergus is writing as part of his fellowship will be a string quartet for the current Hans Keller Artists, the Fibonacci Quartet, who will perform it at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday 30 September 2025.

Tickets available here

On Friday 15 August, the Finborough Theatre will present a new audio poetry recital exploring the work of Sidney Keyes, one of Britain’s finest poets of the Second World War, who was killed in action in 1943, shortly before his 21st birthday.

Remember Your Lovers tells Keyes’ story through the women he loved — above all, his unrequited passion for Milein Cosman, whom he met in Oxford, where he was a scholar at Queen’s College and she a student at the combined Ruskin-Slade School of Fine Art. (More about Milein’s time in Oxford can be found here.)

Performed by Claire Bloom, Catherine Harvey, Alexander Knox, Neil NcPherson, Annabel Mullion, Louse Mai Newberry, Will de Renzy-Martin and Whoopie Van Raam, Remember Your Lovers will be available free online from 15 August.

Further information here.

The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted to be supporting Leighton House‘s special commitment to the art of drawing.

Today sees the opening of a new exhibition, Victorian Treasures, featuring works from the collections of Cecil French and Scott Thomas Buckle, two collectors who began acquiring Victorian art against the grain of fashionable taste. This exhibition will give visitors a fascinating insight into the process of art collecting in a show that includes many works on public view for the first time.

Drawings by leading artists of the period collected by Scott Thomas Buckle will be shown in Leighton House’s new dedicated exhibition space for drawing, the Tavalozza Gallery.

On Tuesday 6 May, Susan Owens will give the 2025 Milein Cosman Lecture on the art of drawing, at the Slade School of Fine Art (where Milein Cosman studied in the 1940s).

Dr Owens’s lecture Places of the Mind, Portraits of the Soul will look at the role of drawing in soul-searching and taking stock — examining in particular the way in which the artists Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745) and John Constable (1776-1837) both used drawing to pursue projects of intense introspection.

Tickets are free and can be booked here.

On Friday 9 May, the fourth year of the Castalian String Quartet’s residency at Oxford University will culminate in two celebration concerts in which students perform with the quartet in exciting and varied programmes of chamber music.

The evening concert, in which the Quartet will join with St Anne’s Camerata, includes premieres of new works for string ensemble by composers Leandro Landolina and Nick Samuel, both in their second year studying music at Oxford (pictured left). Full details and tickets here.

Earlier in the day, oboist Tom Kirby will join the Castalians in Mozart’s oboe quartet, and cellist Oliver Simpson in Schubert’s last chamber work, his cello quintet D.956. Full details and tickets here.

On Wednesday 23 April, the Hans Keller Forum will showcase the talents of the four ensembles who have been working together during its 2024-25 season, in its closing concert at the West Road Concert Hall. Details and tickets here.

The Seion Quartet, the Trio Thalassa, the Heartwood Quartet and the Sonas Quartet have spent three intense residencies in Cambridge, mentored by Donald Grant, Alasdair Beatson and John Myerscough. Also joining the Forum this year have been guest lecturer David Waterman and Artist-in-Residence Gabriel Kidd, the current Milein Cosman Scholar at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

A new podcast called Words on Wordlessness goes live today. Host Nicky Swett, who has spent years studying Hans Keller’s wordless method of analysing music, presents a fascinating exploration of the idea of communicating about music through music alone.

Each series presents one of Keller’s analytical scores in performance, after which Nicky discusses it with musicians, scholars and scientists.

The first series presents Keller’s analysis of Haydn’s Quartet in D minor Op.76 No.2, performed by the Castalian String Quartet, and discussed by violinist Sini Simonen, musicologist Kate Guthrie and composer and broadcaster Bruce Adolphe.

Listen here.
(Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts)

It is with deep sadness that the Trust announces the death of its founding chairman, Julian Hogg.

Julian was devoted to Hans and Milein and did more than anyone to perpetuate their legacies.

Their long and close friendship began sixty years ago, at the 1964 Dartington Summer School of Music.

Read more here