Exhibitions
The very best in modern and contemporary art, on sea
On Now
In a UK first, Hastings Contemporary, an independent charitable arts organisation on England’s south coast, has teamed up with the D4D project, Accentuate UK and Bristol Robotics Lab to offer its members and audiences the opportunity to continue to visit…
COMING SOON TO A VIRTUAL SPACE NEAR YOU! Quentin Blake returns to Hastings Contemporary with a startling showcase of new drawings, paintings, and a large-scale mural he has described as ‘his Guernica’, as raw, original and unlikely as anything he has produced in his eight decades of artistic creativity.
The Age of Turmoil features work by three ground-breaking Modern British artists: Edward Burra (1905-1976), Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and Graham Sutherland (1903-1980). Painted between the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, the work all shares a sense of the anxiety, discomfort and fear that many people felt during this turbulent historical period.
Anne Ryan has curated The Studio at 4 a.m. for Hastings Contemporary, showcasing work by eight exciting contemporary artists: Anna Brass, Frances Burden, Andrew Child, Freya Guest, Xiao-Yang Li, Aimee Parrott, Ross Taylor and Rebecca Truscott-Elves.
Hastings Contemporary has been working with Drawing Life for the past three years hosting life drawing sessions in the gallery studio led by local artists from the Drawing Life team. We are proud to be exhibiting artwork produced during Drawing Life sessions as part of our ongoing programme of art displays in the gallery café, to help raise awareness about dementia and to support health and wellbeing through the arts.
Anne Ryan is a contemporary artist creating highly coloured, constructed paintings that focus on figures engaged in a variety of activities – her subjects dance, party, pose and generally indulge themselves in scenarios that draw on diverse sources from visual culture and the world around her.
Next Exhibitions
COMING SOON TO A VIRTUAL SPACE NEAR YOU! Victor Pasmore (born Chelsham, Surrey 3 December 1908, died Gudja, Malta 23 January 1998) was one of the greatest British artists of his generation, whose pioneering development of abstract art is considered one of the most significant achievements in 20th century British art.
COMING SOON TO A VIRTUAL SPACE NEAR YOU! For The Court of Redonda, UK painter and printmaker Stephen Chambers has conjured a cast of 101 imaginary courtiers, much like the court or ancestral portraits of the “great white male” that adorn the walls of Europe’s highest institutions. But this is not your typical court.
Part of England’s Creative Coast Waterfronts series of public sculpture commissions, Seawall by Andreas Angelidakis considers the encroaching ocean and the ongoing discussion around climate change, coastal erosion and the physical and political impact this has on a place as inspiration for his new work.
4 July 2020 – 11 October 2020
Uniquely combining a wide-ranging survey Modern British art with an extraordinary period of social history, this exuberant anthology show brings together a half century of artistic experimentation on the seaside – from Paul Nash to LS Lowry, and from Barbara Hepworth to Eric Ravilious – alongside archive photos and advertising posters, making a lasting case for the beach and lido as unsung sites of the modernist movement, as integral to the development of modern British art as the cafes and arcades of London and Paris.
6 June 2020 – 11 October 2020
Hastings Contemporary presents historic and new work from the internationally acclaimed American artist, Eric Fischl, the first solo public gallery show in the UK of Fischl’s work since 1985.
17 October 2020 – 3 January 2021
Hastings Contemporary – situated on Europe’s oldest fishing beach, and adjacent to the UK’s major shipwreck museum – provides the perfect setting for several large shipwreck paintings and a series of extraordinary watercolours by Cecily Brown.
17 October 2020 – 3 January 2021
Varda Caivano’s paintings are ‘an inquiry into the practice of painting performed over time’, rewarding the viewer with ever-unfurling nuances that shift and grow, appear then disappear, whilst actively resisting the arrival of any fixed style, mood or meaning.
View our amazing previous exhibitions
Previous exhibitions have showcased artists including Rose Wylie, Gary Hume, Gillian Ayres, Jeffery Camp, Basil Beattie, Ansel Krut, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Chantal Joffe, Ibrahim el Salahi, Sir Quentin Blake, Rachel Howard, Balraj Khanna, Marcus Harvey, Keith Tyson, Dame Paula Rego, Gus Cummins, Maggi Hambling, Sarah Lucas, Barbara Walker and Mark Wallinger – to name a few!
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