Selected exhibitions 2019

Figure Study II
Joe Hill curates the Towner Collection
January 26–May 6
In the first of a series of new collection displays selected by invited guests, Towner’s director Joe Hill curates a personal response to the Gallery’s renowned collection. Hill’s selection spans a period of one hundred years and reflects on how a town’s collection can play a role in building the story of a place and support its aspirations for the future. The display presents nearly sixty works by artists including Christine Binnie, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Elisabeth Frink, Richard Hamilton, Peter Lanyon, John Piper and Walter Sickert.

Ravilious Gallery and Collection Library
Opens January 26
Since the 1930s, Towner has developed one of the largest public collections of work by Eric Ravilious (1903–1942) as well as extensive archive materials. The Ravilious Gallery and Collection Library is a new dedicated space presenting changing exhibitions of Ravilious’ works alongside a library of books on artists in Towner’s Collection.

The Weather Garden: Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection
February 17–June 2
British artist Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection in Towner’s final exhibition as part of the Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme 2016-19. 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 immersive, sensory and unstable installation works. Hardy brings this approach to her selection for Towner, envisioning the space as a shifting impermanent landscape to contain works engaged with material, physical action, and sensuality.

Carey Young: Palais de Justice
February 17–June 2
Towner presents the first UK exhibition of Carey Young’s Palais de Justice (2017), filmed surreptitiously in the enormous and ornate Palais de Justice in Brussels. Young has been developing her interest in law-related work for over a decade, exploring the complex relations between lenses, surveillance and ideas of framing or being framed. Contradicting the familiar patriarchal culture of law, Young’s camera depicts female judges and lawyers at court, seen through a series of circular windows in courtroom doors. Always shooting without permission, Young subtly builds a counter-narrative: a legal system seemingly centred on, and perhaps controlled by women, as if male presence may be optional or unnecessary in this particular future.

Brewers Towner Commission
Launches in May
The Brewers Towner Commission is one of the highlights of a year-long programme celebrating ten years in Towner’s gallery building, designed by Rick Mather Architects, which opened in 2009. Following an Open Call, the new temporary commission will transform the exterior of the gallery with an exceptional public painted artwork encompassing all rendered facades of the building.

Dineo Seshee Bopape: Sedibeng, it comes with the rain
June 15–September 8 
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. The exhibition centres on her immersive installation Sedibeng (it comes with the rain) which was acquired by the Contemporary Art Society for Towner’s collection at Frieze London in 2017. The installation creates a range of associations exploring socio-political and metaphysical notions of fertility, land, resistance, Afro-diasporic spiritual aesthetics and practices.

David Nash: Two Hundred Seasons
September 28 2019–February 2 2020
David Nash: Two Hundred Seasons is the largest and most ambitious exhibition of Nash’s work to date, showing at National Museum Cardiff in May 2019, and at Towner in Autumn 2019. The exhibition is a major survey of Nash’s career from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring his unique contribution to British sculpture and the international Land Art movement. Two Hundred Seasons reflects the artist’s long relationship with Wales and in particular Capel Rhiw, his home and studio for over half a century; and explores his links with East Sussex where Nash lives and works for part of the year.