East Sussex, England
Tim Cooke
Three galleries on England’s south-eastern coast are lighting up summer with a series of exhibitions featuring LS Lowry, Bridget Riley and William Gear among others. Together they are presenting themselves as a Coastal Culture Trail just 90 minutes from London by train.
Start off at Hastings, head to Bexhill-on-Sea and then on to Eastbourne for a three-gallery journey (road and rail are pretty straightforward) which will help make an English summer artistically enriching and more enjoyable. The three galleries are engaged in a joint promotion in the hope of attracting more local visitors as well as those who might be tempted to travel from London and elsewhere.
At Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, right down on the Stade where the fishermen still haul their boats up onto the beach, you can sample the delights of the deftly-conceived Lowry By The Sea featuring 17 of the artist’s works including Yachts (on loan from the Lowry Collection in Salford) and the magnificent and endearing July, the Seaside from the Arts Council England collection.
Lowry By The Sea, Jerwood Gallery, Hastings. Copyright Sam Roberts
Jerwood Gallery regularly punches way above its weight, mixing an engaging series of imaginative temporary shows with works from the Jerwood’s own collection. Other temporary shows on at present include Rachel Howard: At Sea, the artist’s largest solo exhibition, and Quentin Blake’s ever-popular, quirky, watercolours on the theme Life Under Water – A Hastings Celebration. When I visited the gallery was buzzing.
Just 5 miles by road along the coast the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea is hosting Bridget Riley: The Curve Paintings 1961-2014. This is the De La Warr’s 80th anniversary and the Riley show, with some 30 works including some very good-sized pieces, is the most significant art exhibition staged there for some time.
Lagoon 2 / Streak 2 Copyright 2015 Bridget Riley. All rights reserved, courtesy Karsten Schubert, London. Photo: Nigel Green
Hopefully your journey by the coast will have gained you your sea-legs by now as you encounter Riley’s disorientating lines which generate a wave-like motion in the brain. For me the earlier works such as Cataract 2 from 1967 and Streak 2 from 1979 have the greatest power and a lasting place in the history of art. Later works – such as Blue (La Reserve) 2010 and Rajasthan 2012 are also proving popular. Again, the gallery was busy, as was the first floor restaurant with great sea views.
Rajasthan Copyright 2015 Bridget Riley. All rights reserved, courtesy Karsten Schubert, London. Photo: Nigel Green
On to Eastbourne (15 miles by road west of Bexhill) and the Towner Art Gallery has a retrospective of William Gear marking the centenary of his birth. As well as being a leading British abstract painter of the late 1940s (when he lived in Paris for three years) and the 1950s, Gear served as curator of the Towner between 1958 and 1964.
William Gear, Two Fishes, 1948, © the Artist’s Estate, Image courtesy of Auktionshaus-Karbstein, Düsseldorf, Germany
William Gear, Landscape Composition, 1951, © the Artist’s Estate, Image courtesy of Towner, Eastbourne
This exhibition displays the strongest selection of his works I have seen, demonstrating great force of paint, structure and colour.
Gear was born in Scotland and the exhibition moves to Edinburgh later in the year. Towner also has a permanent room devoted to the watercolours of Eric Ravilious, featuring Sussex and the South Downs.
All three galleries are within easy striking distance of London and taken together offer a lovely selection of exhibitions in coastal surroundings.
Casting the net a little wider east and west along the coast, the Turner Contemporary in Margate is currently showing Grayson Perry: Provincial Punk while the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester is hosting St Ives and British Modernism.