It sounds like the ideal exhibition for a snowy winter. But The White Show is opening in the PM Gallery, Ealing, at the height of the British summer.

While it is hard to imagine given the erratic weather we have had so far, the exhibition of more than 40 works was inspired by the notion of the hot white light of a sunny August.

Carol Swords, the gallery's programmer, said the idea for the theme came from a brainstorming session with staff at the Arts Council Collection, which is lending the works.

“The gallery is in a park attached to a house and we started talking about our place and about it being a summer exhibition,” she said.

“It's beautiful here so we began thinking about light and heat and a mid-summer show.”

Works include a white-on-white painting, Je t'adore, baby by Toby Ziegler which uses the reflective material Scotchlite to produce light effects from different perspectives. Other works explore themes of race, absence, spirituality and invisibility.

Keith Coventry's paintings refer to the monochrome work in the Russian Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich but tackling racism. Coventry's White Suprematist Painting is an abstract composition with a newspaper clipping listing the “racist league” of football clubs with supporters guilty of discrimination.

Zineb Sedira uses the white-on-white notion to question the visibility of veiled Muslim women in three photographs entitled Self Portraits of the Virgin Mary.

Stare Out (Blink) by former Turner Prize nominee Runa Islam projects a photographic negative onto a suspended screen and the image left on the retina of the viewer then reverts the negative to a “positive”, completing the work in an involuntary optical effect.

Asked whether it would matter what the weather was like when the exhibition opened, Ms Swords said it would not: “They're important works. Each of them is in the Arts Council Collection for their own raison d'ętre.”

The White Show opens on 19 August and runs until
27 September. Admission is free.