Spring
Manuel Mathieu: The end of figuration
February 17–May 27
Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Haiti) is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation. His work investigates themes of historical violence, erasure and cultural approaches to physicality, nature, and spiritual legacy. Mathieu’s interests are partially informed by his upbringing in Haiti and his experience emigrating to Montréal at the age of 19. Freely operating in between and borrowing from numerous historical influences and traditions, Mathieu aims to find meaning through a spiritual mode of apparition.
Mathieu’s exhibition at DLWP will be his first major institutional presentation in Europe and will bring together new and existing artworks.
Clara Jo: Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood
February 17–March 31
Clara Jo (b. 1986, United States) works with film, photography and installation to re-engage socio-political understandings of the world in ways that entangle the senses. She plays with speculative narratives to offer alternative readings of certain terrains, examining their material imprints and deep erasures. By reimagining these contexts through her work, Jo questions how these stories can feed into collective imaginations and fictions during moments of crisis.
At DLWP, Jo will present Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood. This new film installation presents a speculative narrative of labour and ecological histories in Mauritius, filmed in Albion and Flat Island, with a fictional layer of computer-generated animation.
Laetitia Yhap
April 6–May 27
Laetitia Yhap (b. 1941, UK) is best known for intricate paintings of fishermen on The Stade Beach, Hastings, UK, created on unusually shaped panels individually hand-made by the artist for each work. Yhap moved to Hastings from London in 1967, and in 1974 began her cycle of work depicting raw glimpses into the lives of the fishing community, documenting daily scenes as they unfolded on the beach.
Enraptured by the ritual of their activities, Yhap began to draw the fishermen from life before returning to her studio to make the paintings. She would continue making works of this community for twenty-five years, bringing forth their resilience and spirit in the face of such dangerous labour conditions. Yhap’s oeuvre serves as a unique picture of an industry that today looks completely different, as rapid industrialisation and environmental shifts render the lives of those working at sea increasingly precarious.
This exhibition at DLWP celebrates Yhap as a unique voice within British art history and highlights the relevance of her work to pressing ecological concerns within our local and wider landscapes.
Summer
June 22–September 1
Barbara Kasten
Space as a stage of a changing reality is the central motif of Barbara Kasten’s (b. 1936, United States) photographs and film installations, which she produces in an ‘interdisciplinary performance’ between photography, sculpture, architecture, and painting. Since the 1970s, Kasten has been constructing expansive installations made of architectural ‘props’ such as glass, mirrors, or wood constructions in front of the camera for her abstract ‘photographs’. These theatrical arrangements are restaged with coloured light, an approach going back to Kasten’s roots as a painter and sculptor.
Through her cross-genre practice and continued use of analogue photographic materials, Kasten’s visionary practice has influenced a new generation of contemporary artists amidst the prevalence of digital imagery, Photoshop and 3D rendering today. Kasten’s exhibition at DLWP will be her first institutional solo presentation in the UK and will centre upon a new installation responding to the distinctive architectural features of our Grade I listed building.
Rebecca Bellantoni
Rebecca Bellantoni (b. 1981, UK) is a London-based artist who draws from everyday occurrences and abstracts them. She works across moving image, installation, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, sound-text, and ceramics.
Through investigations into the layered lens of Black women’s writing (fiction and nonfiction), metaphysics, philosophy, religion and spirituality, geography and the aesthetics of them, Bellantoni gently prises apart the concept of the accepted/expected ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’, looking at how these removed borders may offer meditative experiences and portals to self, collective reasoning and healing thought and action. Bellantoni’s presentation at DLWP will be her first institutional solo exhibition.
Autumn
September 21–November 17
Mike Silva
Mike Silva (b. 1970, Sweden) is a London-based artist whose work explores intimate connections to personal memory. By delving into an ongoing archive of photographs, Silva paints portraits, interiors and still lifes that often feature acquaintances, friends, and lovers of past and present.
Rooted in the London of the ‘90s or early ‘00s, many of the photographs that Silva paints from carry the allure of the past, but also the inherent poignancy in looking at an image of a moment that no longer exists. Whilst the paintings are a way of remembering, they are also cathartically about letting go. Silva’s interiors or domestic spaces expose quietly observed moments, such as when light hits a particular wall or floor of a shared bedroom, kitchen or living room. Using white generously in the painting process offers a milky or hazy quality to the works, perhaps a reflection on the ungraspable and transient nature of memory.
At DLWP, Silva will present a selection of new and existing works in our light-filled Ground floor gallery. This will be his first institutional solo exhibition.
Michelle Roberts
Michelle Roberts (b. UK) is a Bexhill-based artist whose paintings and drawings are ambitious in scale, conception and realisation. Her subjects arise from the realm of lived experience, such as a holiday, a visit to the ‘Dinosaur World’ exhibition, or the thrill of an Air Show, whilst other works celebrate events such as the Diamond Jubilee, Remembrance Day, or films that she has seen. While photographs serve as references, they are mere hints and prompts rather than images to be copied. Roberts’ meticulous drawing style intricately dissects shapes and forms, creating patterns with unwavering precision and control, with compositions that come to life through vivid colour. Through detailed yet joyful execution, Roberts invites the viewer to explore each of these vibrant universes, drawing our attention to the different ways that we remember.
Roberts’ solo exhibition is programmed in collaboration with Outside In, following the artist winning first prize at Outside In’s national open exhibition, Humanity, in 2023. Roberts is a member of Project Art Works, a collective of neurodiverse artists and activists based in Hastings, and was previously included in the group exhibition, In the Realm of Others at DLWP (2015).
Winter
Opening November 30
Callum Hill
Callum Hill (b. 1987, Canada) is a British/American artist filmmaker whose work moves between psychological enquiry, gender, politics, and poetry. Unpredictable and erratic in narrative, her films slip between documentary and fiction, inhabiting an existential and psychedelic mentality towards the human condition.
For her solo exhibition, Hill is developing a major new film work, commissioned by DLWP.
