What’s On

Alongside our exhibition, Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life, you can view The Sculptor Speaks – a looped audio-visual work by artist and composer Olivia Louvel, based on an archival tape holding a 1961 talk by Barbara Hepworth, pre-recorded herself for use by the British Council. 

This exhibition, which has garnered rave reviews across the country after visits to Wakefield, Edinburgh and St Ives, will display some of Hepworth’s most celebrated sculptures including the modern abstract carving that launched her career in the 1920s and 1930s, her iconic strung sculptures of the 1940s and 1950s, and large-scale bronze and carved sculptures from later in her career.

The self-titled Nibble Bibble Duck Toes are a collective of year nine students from the Turing School exploring creative thinking and making in the lead up to Turner Prize 2023 at Towner. They are supported by artist Richard Phoenix.

Wriggle Room: Open Studio is an installation of interactive artworks including costume, sculpture and animation that have been developed over the first 12 months of Towner’s early years programme.

In Towner’s one-hundredth year, we present a selection of new acquisitions that have joined our permanent collection more recently, many of which are unseen, having not yet been displayed since being acquired.

Play Interact Explore is an exhibition of interactive artworks and resources  developed in collaboration with community groups in Eastbourne and Brighton. A lively, exciting and curiosity-filled space designed to support and encourage visitors of all types to take part in playful exploration and critical thought through making.  

The Living Collection will consider Towner’s broad and varied history of collecting and exhibiting over the past one hundred years through a selection of paintings, prints and artifacts.

Selected works from the Towner Collection bringing stories about forgotten or neglected queer histories to the surface, including works by Wilfred Avery, Edward Burra, Kathleen Walne, Cedric Morris, John Minton and Elizabeth Andrews.

Ayo Akingbade presents a duo of films: 55 Days (2022) and Red Soleil (2021). These works reflect the aspirations and ambitions of an emerging artist navigating the challenges and opportunities of daily life.  

The second Brewers Towner International, an open call exhibition of contemporary visual art, returns to Towner Eastbourne, featuring both British and International artists.

David Blandy, as part of his upcoming artist’s residency at Towner Eastbourne, will be presenting a live collaborative immersive installation alongside an archive of his psychogeographical research.

Tuning in a Vacuum by Rita Evans is a new work coming to Towner Eastbourne to coincide with the reopening of our newly designed ground floor spaces, currently undergoing major redevelopment as part of a series of capital works.

Andrea Mindel, a contemporary textile and multi-disciplinary artist based in the UK, carried out an intervention: WAR?! WHAT WAR? - How does one achieve eternal bliss?  Using the traditional embroidery technique of goldwork, they sat at a traditional loom weaving a memorial blanket for those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Life in Art & Reuniting the Twenties Group showcase pioneering female gallerist, Lucy Wertheim’s vast contribution to mid-20th century modern art, reuniting works from her collection and telling her own story and that of the artists that she fervently championed.

Artist and guest curator Jananne Al-Ani has chosen works from the Towner Collection by a broad range of artists including Roni Horn, Marine Hugonnier, Peter Lanyon, Eric Ravilious, Jem Southam and Victor Pasmore, bringing together a range of prints, photographs, moving image works and paintings, displayed with two further works of her own, Excavators (2010) and Black Powder Peninsula (2016).

In an ambitious new moving image work, Jananne Al-Ani reveals a micro landscape within the surface of a museum object and employs testimony and storytelling to reflect on the relationship between Britain and Iraq.

The work of the multi-skilled painter, printmaker, illustrator, and tapestry designer, Eileen Mayo (1906-1994) will be celebrated in a solo exhibition at Towner Eastbourne in 2022; her first in the UK.  

Melissa Gordon (b.1981, Cambridge, USA) is an artist, curator, and writer, whose practice is concerned with the body, gesture, and painting, through the lens of feminism.

Modernist Constructs introduces and reveals Margaret Mellis’ artistic accomplishments and her importance within the British Modernist movement. This exhibition draws from Mellis’ extensive repertoire of work, spanning her career and illuminating the breadth of her practice.

This exhibition reflects on the ideas surrounding how the optical iris works, moving from the intimate and unspoken to the communal, stretching to different times, reflective of the nature of painting itself.

Artist Mariana Castillo Deball has delved deep into the Towner Collection to discover works that have rarely been displayed and will present these alongside familiar and much-loved depictions of the Sussex landscape.

Vertigo Sea is a poetic and affecting meditation on man’s relationship with the sea, and its role in the history of slavery, migration, trade, and conflict.

Towner Eastbourne is pleased to present the most comprehensive major exhibition of work in over 50 years by John Nash, one of the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20th century.

Towner International is a new biennial exhibition of contemporary art that will take place for the first time at Towner Eastbourne from 6 October 2020 to 11 April 2021.

In this Towner exhibition, curated by the artists, Christine and Jennifer Binnie used their own work to complement pieces chosen from Towner’s Collection.

Towner are pleased to present a major exhibition Alan Davie (1920–2014) and David Hockney (b. 1937) that will explore the convergence between these two major figures of post-war British painting.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan's eight-monitor installation was presented at Towner Eastbourne with sound, using collected cell-phone-video footage from 2011 to document a ‘shouting valley’ that lies in the contested area of the Golan Heights, Syria.

Selecting from the 5000 works in Towner’s permanent Collection, Caroline Lucas' choices reflect and resonate with her passions and interests, from her environmental work, issues of climate change and effects on our landscape, to her love of living in Sussex.

200 Seasons is a major survey of Nash’s career from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring the different ways the artist has cut, carved and manipulated wood to produce work that crosses abstraction and figuration, yet always retains reference to the forms of the original tree and the unique qualities of the chosen material.  

Towner presents the first solo exhibition in a UK public institution by Dineo Seshee Bopape. Born and based in South Africa, the award-winning artist addresses politics, race, spirituality, gender and sexuality.

Anne Hardy’s work derives from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather – using what she finds there to manifest sensory and unstable installation works that fully immerse you.

Towner’s presentation of Carey Young’s Palais de Justice (2017) is the UK debut of the artist’s critically acclaimed video installation, which she filmed surreptitiously in the enormous and ornate Palais de Justice in Brussels. 

GUSH is a new body of large-scale dynamic sound sculpture, film, wall-based works and a specially commissioned performance by British artist Hannah Perry. 

Best known for his vibrant, unsettling oil paintings of East London’s urban landscape and the disintegrating office blocks and shabby store fronts near his studio, Simon Ling’s exhibition for Towner Eastbourne showcases a new series of paintings created over the last year, alongside earlier works.

The Everyday and Extraordinary is a wide-ranging exhibition exploring the found object in modern and contemporary art. With work by over fifty international artists, the exhibition is a rich, playful and immersive celebration of the physicality of the object in our digital age, a cabinet of curiosities that spills out of Towner’s first floor gallery and into the public areas beyond. 

Towner Eastbourne’s open exhibition brings together the best artists from across East and West Sussex.

Towner is delighted to present At Altitude and 5000 is the Best, an exhibition and film installation exploring how our experience of landscape, space and territory has been transformed through new aerial perspectives of the world.  

Edward Stott: A Master of Colour and Atmosphere is a long overdue retrospective of artist Edward Stott (1855-1918), ‘the poet-painter of the twilight’ celebrated in his time for atmospheric, ethereal depictions of rural and biblical life.  

Towner Eastbourne presents Inhabit, inviting you to inhabit the gallery spaces as you move through three defined ‘settings’. Curated entirely using works from the Towner Collection.

Towner Eastbourne presents Natural Selection by the artist Andy Holden and his father, the well-known ornithologist Peter Holden. Exploring the history of birds’ nests and egg collecting through animation, video, sculpture, and music, Natural Selection marks the culmination of a five-year collaboration between Holden and his father, now on a national UK tour.

Towner Art Gallery presents We stared at the Moon from the centre of the Sun, a new exhibition curated by internationally acclaimed artist Haroon Mirza with works from the Arts Council Collection, and interventions orchestrated by the artist and his studio hrm199, tracing the connections between them.