Es Devlin Embraces the 'Everythingist' Label at New Retrospective

Es Devlin, the British artist and designer behind Beyoncé gigs, fashion runways and Olympic spectacles, has opened a new retrospective — and she is claiming a title borrowed from a Russian modernist: "everythingist."

The story begins four years ago, when the V&A East Storehouse in east London contacted Devlin. The museum's curators invited her to respond to a 100-year-old theatrical backdrop by the Russian artist and designer Natalia Goncharova.

The backdrop was no minor artefact. For a 1926 London production of The Firebird by the Ballets Russes, Goncharova painted a fortified Muscovite cityscape festooned with onion domes and spires, rust-red and golden against a deep-blue sky.

Devlin did not know much about Goncharova at first. Then she alighted on the term Goncharova had favoured for describing her kaleidoscopic approach to art-making, and realised she had found a kindred spirit.

"She called herself an 'everythingist'," Devlin says, a smile in her eyes.

The exchange captures why big names turn to Devlin for eye-popping spectacle. A century apart, the two women share a refusal to stay inside one discipline — painting, stage design, installation and public art all sit within Devlin's range, just as Goncharova moved between backdrop painting, costume and canvas.

Devlin works from her studio in London, where the Guardian gained a glimpse of works in progress ahead of the retrospective's opening. The commission from the V&A East Storehouse sits at the heart of the new show: a living artist answering a dead one across a hundred-year divide.

The pairing is pointed. Goncharova's Firebird backdrop transformed a London stage in 1926 with sheer pictorial ambition — a walled city rendered at architectural scale. Devlin's own career has rested on the same conviction: that a stage picture can carry the emotional weight of a performance, whether the venue is an opera house, a stadium or a runway.

By taking up Goncharova's self-description as her own, Devlin positions herself not as a specialist in set design but as an artist who works across every form the job demands. The label "everythingist", coined in another century by a woman who also refused categories, now anchors a retrospective in the city where both artists built their stage careers.

Whether the Goncharova response becomes a fixture of the V&A East Storehouse's programming — and how Devlin's stadium-scale instincts translate into a museum gallery — will shape how this everythingist is read a century from now.