In-Conversation: Anne Hardy and Maureen Paley

£5 (General)

£3 (Concessions: Full time Students, 18 - 25, Disability PIP/Universal Credit, Pension Credit)

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Artist Anne Hardy and gallery founder and director Maureen Paley will come together to discuss Hardy's practise and her wall sculpture Outlier, which was recently added to the Towner Collection. The sculptural piece will be on show at Towner for the exhibition Points of View, which explores contemporary understandings of the collection's historic themes around landscape, place and memory.

There will be 15 minutes at the end for audience questions.

Outlier is a gift of Emma and Frederick Goltz, presented to the Towner Collection through the Contemporary Art Society, 2023/24.

We have a budget available to make this event as accessible as possible – this can include further interpretation services or other access arrangements we can meet to enable you to participate. If you require access arrangements, please email programme@townereastbourne.org.uk two weeks before the event date so that we can book a service if needed.

About the speakers

Anne Hardy

Anne Hardy works across sculpture and large-scale installation. Her works incorporate found materials and cast objects in delicate cosmologies that explore energetic states, sentience, transformation, fragility and strength. Hardy's large-scale sculptural installations, ‘FIELDWORKS’, combine physical materials with light and sound to create immersive and sensual environments that derive from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather. 

Anne Hardy has had exhibitions at major institutions in the UK and Europe, including Tate Britain, London; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Hayward Gallery, London and Secession, Vienna. Hardy has also been invited to curate exhibitions including an invitation to work with the Arts Council Collection, where she created a site-specific sensory installation, ‘The Weather Garden’ at Towner Art Gallery, UK, 2019. In 2021/22 Hardy’s work was included in the landmark touring exhibition British Art Show 9 and in 2022 she was nominated for the Mario Merz Prize. Also in 2022 Hardy was artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, USA. Alongside her work as an artist Anne Hardy is also a co-founder, together with Fatos Ustek and Lindsay Seers, of Frank Fair Artist Pay who advocate for fair practice in the arts.

Maureen Paley

Maureen Paley was born in New York, studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated from Brown University before coming to the UK in 1977 where she completed her Masters at The Royal College of Art from 1978–80. She founded Maureen Paley, one of the first galleries to present contemporary art in London’s East End and a pioneer of the current scene, promoting and showing a diverse range of international artists. Since September 1999 the gallery has been situated in industrial spaces in Bethnal Green, and in July 2017 Maureen Paley opened a second space Morena di Luna in Hove. In October 2020 a third space, Studio M was opened in the Rochelle School in Shoreditch. From its inception, the gallery’s aim has remained consistent: to promote great and innovative artists in all media.

Together with running the gallery, Maureen Paley has also curated a number of large-scale public exhibitions. In 1994 she organised an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzales Torres, Joseph Kosuth and Ad Reinhardt at the Camden Arts Centre. In 1995 Wall to Wall was presented for the Arts Council GB National Touring Exhibitions and appeared at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Southampton City Art Gallery and Leeds City Art Gallery showing wall drawings by international artists including Daniel Buren, Michael Craig-Martin, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Lawrence Weiner.