Past Exhibitions
Browse our archive of exhibitions from the past 10 years
Browse our archive of exhibitions from the past 10 years
2024
CLARA JO: NESTS OF BASLT, NESTS OF WOOD
17 February – 1 April
For her first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, Jo presented the documentary fiction film, Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood. The film is grounded by documentary footage shot by the artist whilst embedded with a research group from Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage on location in Albion and Flat Island, Mauritius.
MANUEL MATHIEU: THE END OF FIGURATION
17 February – 27 May
The end of figuration was Mathieu’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe and focused on a series of new paintings and a site-specific fabric installation reaching through the centre of the gallery. The artist’s mixing of mediums across painting, ceramics, and fabric is underpinned by a provocation: how might we conceive the end of figuration within art making, such that we see in a work only what we wish to find?
LAETITIA YHAP: AN ENDING TO A BEGINNING
6 April – 2 June
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.
BARBARA KASTEN: SITE LINES
22 June – 8 September
Over a career spanning five decades, Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, United States) has experimented with notions of space, stage and architecture through an ‘interdisciplinary performance’ between photography, sculpture, and painting. In creating her works, she assembles and photographs in her studio installations made of architectural ‘props’, such as glass, mirror, metal, or wood constructions. Space as a stage of changing reality is the central motif of the resulting artworks, with theatrical arrangements notable for their use of colour, light and shadow.
REBECCA BELLANTONI: DAY AND HEAVY, JUDAH LEAVES
22 June – 1 September
Working with moving image, installation, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, sound, text, and ceramics, Rebecca Bellantoni (b. 1981, UK) draws from everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Through investigations into the layered lens and aesthetics of Black women’s writing (fiction and nonfiction), metaphysics, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and geography, she 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 the self, collective reasoning and healing thought and action.
MIKE SILVA
22 September – 26 January
Silva (b. 1970, Sandviken, Sweden) paints portraits, interiors, still lifes, and landscapes drawn from an ongoing personal archive of photographic material. This archive, much of which is rooted in the London of the 1990s and early 2000s, is presented as an evolving constellation on the artist’s studio walls, with printed photographs tacked, taped, grid-lined, and painted. These images serve as a flexible material that Silva draws from instinctively, gradually shifting their subjects from the photographic to painted space.
CALLUM HILL: E-MINOR
22 September – 19 January
De La Warr Pavilion was pleased to present E-Minor, a major new film commission by Bristol-based artist, Callum Hill (b. 1987, Montreal, Canada). Combining 35mm and 16mm film and archival footage, this 13-minute piece takes viewers on a psychedelic journey to explore the shadows of Western society. E-Minor is characteristic of Hill’s approach to filmmaking, which moves between psychological enquiry, gender, politics, and poetry. Unpredictable and erratic in narrative, her films slip between documentary and fiction in their exploration of the human condition. The film was presented in a site-specific installation in DLWP’s First floor gallery.
2023
ANNA MARIA NABIRYE & ANNIE SAUNDERS: UP IN ARMS
4 February – 21 May 2023
A major new multimedia commission by artists Anna Maria Nabirye and Annie Saunders, exploring friendship, anti-racism and feminism.
A major new multimedia commission removing the boundaries between process and outcome. The artists bring together social practice, visual art and performance in their interdisciplinary project, Up in Arms, to create meaningful dialogue amidst the complexity of interracial friendships.
ANGELO MADSEN MINAX: A CRISIS OF HUMAN CONTACT
4 February – 21 May 2023
The first major institutional exhibition of multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax, whose practice spans documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, media installation, sound, music, performance, text and collective practices.
KATIE CUDDON: NIGHT PORTRAITS
10 June – 3 September 2023
Night Portraits drew upon Cuddon’s recent research into the relationships between clay, writing, death, and the body. This work was pursued with fellowships and research grants from the Leverhulme Trust and Wellcome Trust.
MOHAMMED SAMI: THE POINT 0
10 June – 28 August 2023
The Point 0 was Mohammed Sami’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK and was organised by Camden Art Centre in collaboration with De La Warr Pavilion.
HÉLIO OITICICA: WAITING FOR THE INTERNAL SUN
Saturday 23 September 2023 – Sunday 14 January 2024
This landmark exhibition, presented across DLWP’s gallery spaces, centred on the artist’s life and work throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, during which he spent brief stints in London and Sussex, and then an extended period in New York City before returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1978.
2022
LUCY STEIN: WET ROOM
29 January – 9 May 2022
Wet Room is a major solo exhibition by Cornwall-based artist Lucy Stein. Obsessive, unashamedly emotional and loaded with a strong psychological charge, Stein’s work incorporates a heady mixture of styles and references. Weaving together personal experiences with feminist and psychoanalytic theory, mythology and religion, her drawings, paintings and installations draw upon the concept of the ‘female gaze’ to question the representation of women in art history.
Wet Room was also presented at Spike Island as part of the West of England Visual Arts Alliance programme, supported by Arts Council England.
BASSAM ISSA: I AM ERROR
29 January – 2 May 2022
Iraqui-born Bassam Issa is the fifth artist to take part in the Freelands Gasworks Partnership, a programme for emerging artists based outside of London.
I AM ERROR explores the construction of masculinity in action-adventure video games. Presented in an immersive cinematic environment, Issa’s new CGI films confront the armouring of the male body in gaming culture by queering its military ethos from within.
Commissioned by Gasworks, in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, with the generous support of the Freelands Foundation.
MINORU NOMATA: WINDSCAPE
21 May – 4 September 2022
Tokyo based artist, Minoru Nomata (b. 1955) had his first solo exhibition outside of Asia at the De La Warr Pavilion, bringing together works made over the last thirty years of his career.
Nomata’s visionary paintings depict imaginary landscapes that transcend time and place. Featuring architectural superstructures and topographical forms devoid of human presence, his uncanny depictions are portals into mysterious and uncertain worlds.
RESOLVE COLLECTIVE: LIDO
28 May – 4 September 2022
RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective combining architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges.
The exhibition, LIDO, was part of What The Wild Things Are, an artist research collaboration between RESOLVE, Wellcome Collection in London, West Dean College in West Sussex, and the De La Warr Pavilion. It is the result of a programme of collaborative design ‘forages’ with young people from Bexhill College and the De La Warr Pavilion’s young people’s group, The Blueprint Collective
BABES IN ARMS
10 September – 10 November 2022
Babes In Arms is a collective of artist mothers living in Hastings, St Leonards and Bexhill, who have come together through a shared experience of the inspiration and the difficulties that are attached to being an artist or creative whilst also trying to raise a child.
Exhibition took place in our rooftop space
ZINEB SEDIRA: CANT YOU SEE THE SEA CHANGING?
24 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
This major exhibition was Sedira’s first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery for over 12. Conceived in collaboration with Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), where the exhibition was presented in spring 2023, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? focused on Sedira’s ongoing investigation into the conditions of transnational trade, identity and migrant consciousness in a post-colonial context, within which the sea is a recurring motif.
The exhibition is a collaboration between De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and supported by Fluxus.
2021
HOLLY HENDRY: INDIFFERENT DEEP
Ground floor gallery
19 May – 30 August
INVERTEBRATE
Outdoors 29
May – 12 November
Two major new projects by artist Holly Hendry addressing subjects that include borders, edges, bodies and machines.
Invertebrate was a giant composite form that wormed its way around the outside of De La Warr Pavilion, stretching from the seafront lawn to the First floor balcony and the roof. Inside, an accompanying exhibition by Hendry showed the after-effects of the invertebrate’s actions.
A Waterfronts commission as part of England’s Creative Coast
ALL IN THE SAME STORM: PANDEMIC PATCHWORK STORIES
STITCH FOR CHANGE AND THE REFUGEE BUDDY PROJECT, HASTINGS, ROTHER & WEALDEN
19 May – 30 August 2021
This project began in late 2019 to bring people together through storytelling and making in the style of Chilean arpilleras.
After taking the project online during the pandemic, the Refugee Buddy Project received 95 patchwork squares from people across the community, including those seeking refuge, volunteers, and students from a Hastings-based FE College. They were sewn together and presented in the first floor gallery as four quilts that tell diverse stories of life under the shadow of COVID-19 through hand-stitched patchwork squares that reveal tales of resistance, change, togetherness, isolation, loss and home.
HELEN CANN: A MAP OF THE SEA AND THE DE LA WARR PAVILION
Wednesday 21 July 2021 –Tuesday 30 August 2022
This new commission took the form of a mural for the in the Rooftop Foyer.
Cann’s drawing depicts the Pavilion facing a swirling sea of historic events and figures, current desires, provocations and predictions, and maritime details and a second iteration can still be seen covering our outside trailer bar.
ALEXI MARSHALL: CURSEBREAKERS
18 September 2021 – 16 January 2022
Cursebreakers is a new body of work that includes linocut prints, mosaics and embroidery that refer to representations of hybrid female figures and fantastic landscapes. Driven by the need for new mythologies, Marshall constructs imaginary worlds that encourage a purposeful examination of, and dialogue between, multiple traditions and histories.
A collaboration between Flatland Projects and the De La Warr Pavilion.
SHARIF PERSAUD: HAVE YOU EVER HAD
16 October 2021 – 9 January 2022
Sharif Persaud has been a member of Project Art Works since 2014. This solo exhibition features drawing, large paintings and the award winning short film The Mask, filmed backstage at the De La Warr Pavilion with Al Murray, in 2017.
Coming directly from Autograph, London, this exhibition was the culmination of EXPLORERS, a three year, UK-wide project celebrating the extraordinary contributions neurodiverse people make to art and culture, led by Turner Prize nominees Project Art Works.
2020
ZADIE XA: CHILD OF MAGOHALMI AND THE ECHOES OF CREATION
1 February – 3 January 2021 (extended due to the pandemic)
Zadie Xa created a sub-aquatic marine environment, inviting audiences to enter into an immersive world by way of atmospheric lighting, surround-sound, large-scale video projections, sculptures and costumes. The Korean-Canadian artist brought together imagined and learned Korean folklore, transforming diasporic knowledge into new realities and presented an origin story inspired by Korean creation myths.
A co-commission with Art Night, London (22 June 2019), YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (12 July – 29 September 2019), Tramway, Glasgow (26 October – 16 December 2019) and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill.
MARC BAUER: MAL ȆTRE / PERFORMANCE
Saturday 1 February 2020 – Sunday 3 January 2021 (extended due to the pandemic)
For his first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery, Bauer chose to draw small and large scale works on paper, a wall drawing and an animation.
Mal Ȇtre / Performance featured the motif of people on boats throughout history, from ancient Greece to contemporary media footage. All of the works are drawn in graphite, and images range from those inspired by fifteenth-century Catholic ex-voto paintings, to Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, up to Aquarius, the boat that rescued migrants in the Mediterranean Sea in 2018.
Commissioned jointly by Drawing Room and De La Warr Pavilion and is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery.
2019
LAUREN GODFREY: GROUP HAT
Saturday 15 June 2019 – Sunday 15 September 2019
Throughout the summer, artist Lauren Godfrey transformed the First floor gallery into a space for learning and unlearning.
Group Hat was inspired by Lauren Godfrey’s impression of the De La Warr Pavilion and the town of Bexhill as a ‘porous chorus’ of people, organisations, buildings, pieces of furniture, steps and surfaces that together form a whole.
HOW CHICAGO! IMAGISTS 1960S & 70S
Saturday 15 June 2019 – Sunday 8 September 2019
How Chicago! Imagists 1960s & 70s features works by Roger Brown, Sarah Canright, Jim Falconer, Ed Flood, Art Green, Phil Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, Karl Wirsum and Ray Yoshida.
In the mid-1960s, Chicago saw an explosion of artistic activity centred around a small group of artists who would later become known as the Chicago Imagists. Their distinct and lively visual style would go on to influence some of the most important artists of the 20th century.
STILL I RISE: FEMINISMS, GENDER, RESISTANCE, ACT 2
Saturday 9 February 2019 – Monday 27 May 2019
Still I Rise is a timely exhibition exploring the history of resistance and alternative forms of living from the perspective of gender. This major group exhibition looks at the many forms resistance can take: from intimate acts to large-scale uprisings, from the late 19th century to the present and beyond.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. It has been curated by Irene Aristizábal (Nottingham Contemporary), Rosie Cooper (De La Warr Pavilion) and Cédric Fauq (Nottingham Contemporary).
RENEE SO: ANCIENT AND MODERN
Saturday 28 September 2019 – Sunday 12 January 2020
Renee So’s exhibition was comprised of an entirely new body of work. It included hand-woven textiles, furniture, and ceramic works that refer to representations of the female figure in prehistoric cultures. A tiled mural is based on the Egyptian goddess of the night, Nut, her body bent in a yoga-like pose in order to provide shelter to the earth; other ceramic sculptures are reminiscent of pre-Columbian figurines of Venus.
MIKHAIL KARIKIS: I HEAR YOU
Saturday 28 September 2019 – Sunday 19 January 2020
This major commission by Mikhail Karikis explored the relationship between listening and care. Karikis’ moving image installation has been developed with carers and non-verbal people who use studio space at Project Art Works, an artist-led organisation in Hastings that collaborates with people who have complex support needs. Through I Hear You, Karikis invited us to pay attention the sensitive tuning-in of support workers, artists and family members to those they support – a precarious role that is often invisible, misunderstood and undervalued by society.
2018
A TALE OF MOTHER’S BONES: GRACE PAILTHORPE, REUBEN MEDNIKOFF AND THE BIRTH OF PSYCHOREALISM
Saturday 6 October 2018 – Sunday 20 January 2019
An exhibition of paintings, drawings and autobiographical ephemera paired with in-depth psychoanalytic interpretation.
Dr Grace Pailthorpe (surgeon/psychoanalyst/artist, 1883-1971) and Reuben Mednikoff (artist, 1906-1972) began collaborating in 1935. From that year until their deaths, they produced a huge body of work that included startlingly vivid and wildly experimental paintings and drawings, often paired with in-depth psychoanalytic interpretation, as well as autobiography, poetry and short stories. They spent decades of their lives researching how the visual and literary arts might liberate individuals and societies from the constraints that sickened and impoverished them, together developing a creative process that combined Surrealism with psychoanalysis, bringing artistic and scientific thinking together.
LUCY BEECH: HYPERSTIMULATION
Saturday 15 September 2018 – Sunday 2 December 2018
Lucy Beech’s solo exhibition Hyperstimulation presents a new film accompanied by a text by Naomi Pearce.
The looping film, entitled Reproductive Exile, follows the fictional story of a woman undertaking cross-border fertility treatment. The film is set in private international clinic in the Czech Republic, where lack of legislation associated with reproductive rights sustains a booming fertility industry. Here the intended parent is introduced to ‘Eve’ (short for Evatar), a robotic version of the female reproductive system. Addressing gender bias in biomedical research and based on developments in reproductive science, ‘Eve’ is the future of drug testing in women and personalised medicine.
FLORENCE PEAKE: RITE: ON THIS PLIANT BODY WE SLIP OUR WOW!
Saturday 12 May 2018 – Sunday 2 September 2018
RITE reinterprets a monumental moment in modernism’s history: Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. This notorious production provoked riots when it opened in 1913.
ALISON WILDING: RIGHT HERE AND OUT THERE
Saturday 23 June 2018 – Sunday 16 September 2018
Right Here and Out There is an exhibition of new and existing works by Alison Wilding that unfolds inside and outside our gallery, with works selected in response to the landscape and the light.
Regarded as one of the UK’s foremost sculptors, Wilding’s abstract works use contrasting materials such as neoprene rubber, translucent acrylic, alabaster and steel to create sensual juxtapositions which explore the complexities of perception.
TAMAR GUIMARÃES & KASPER AKHØJ: I BLEW ON MR GREENHILL’S MAIN JOINTS WITH A VERY ‘HOT’ BREATH
Saturday 24 February 2018 – Sunday 3 June 2018
‘I blew on Mr.Greenhill’s main joints with a very ‘hot’ breath’ presents moving image and photographic works from the last ten years, selected in response to the Pavilion’s architecture and social context.
CAROLINE ACHAINTRE: FANTÔMAS
Saturday 20 January 2018 – Sunday 29 April 2018
Fantômas was an exhibition of new works by artist Caroline Achaintre.
Her visually striking, witty ceramic sculptures and hand-tufted wall hangings incorporate diverse references such as catwalk fashion, carnival, and death-metal iconography, as well as Primitivism and Expressionism – early twentieth-century Western art movements that borrowed heavily from non-Western and prehistoric imagery to find new ways of representing the modern world.
YEMI AWOSILE: DIGITAL NATIVE
Saturday 20 January 2018 – Sunday 15 April 2018
Throughout Autumn 2017, Awosile engaged Thornwood Care Home staff and residents living with dementia in conversation and shared creative activities.
From this series of social interventions, she developed a collection of digitally embroidered fabrics inspired by her encounters and the site. Awosile tests how craft innovation might help to bridge the gap between a younger generation of digital natives and those brought up before the digital age – people who might be more familiar with hand-crafted techniques
PLATFORM GRADUATE AWARD
Saturday 15 December 2018 – Sunday 27 January 2019
Platform was a showcase of the best new work from graduates of Sussex Coast College, Hastings, and the University of Brighton.
It included photography, sculpture, moving image and painting by five young artists: Tasneem Arif, Godith Hawkins, Katie Needham, Oscar Yasamee, and Maddalena Zadra.
2017
SIMON PATTERSON
SAFARI: AN EXHIBITION AS EXPEDITION
Saturday 20 May 2017 – Sunday 3 September 2017
This exhibition took the visitor on a mini safari throughout the De La Warr Pavilion where they will encounter, interspersed with Patterson’s own work, objects drawn from Bexhill and Hastings Museums.
ROY VOSS: THE WAY THINGS ARE
Saturday 23 September 2017 – Sunday 28 January 2018
Roy Voss’ commission The Way Things Are was a sculpture that stretched the length of the Pavilion’s ground floor gallery space, between the floor-to-ceiling windows and the thin columns that run along it.
Constructed from machined and push-jointed wood, the sculpture’s form is drawn from the artist’s memories and from Victorian lithographs. It was a delicate and precise skeletal form that conjures an idea of a pier.
GEORGE SHAW: MY BACK TO NATURE
Saturday 25 March 2017 – Sunday 18 June 2017
My Back to Nature was a series of new paintings and drawings made by George Shaw whilst in residence at the National Gallery.
The work resonates with the artist’s experience of walking in the forest near his hometown as a teenager, with the feeling that ‘something out the ordinary could happen at any time there, away from the supervision of adults.’
JONANTHAN BALDOCK AND EMMA HART
LOVE LIFE ACT III
Saturday 21 October 2017 – Sunday 7 January 2018
LOVE LIFE was Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart’s most ambitious collaboration to date: a radical reimagining of the traditional seaside show Punch and Judy. LOVE LIFE ACT III draws on the history of the Pavilion, originally designed as a ‘people’s palace’ to provide culture and entertainment for all.
PLATFORM
Saturday 16 September 2017 – Sunday 5 November 2017
In 2017, The De La Warr Pavilion showcased their selected artists for the Platform Graduate Award.
The artists were Sophie Barber, Amy Wilson (University of Brighton at Sussex Coast College, Hastings) and The 13 Person Collective (thirteen graduates of the University of Brighton) who are Lorna Ough, Rosie Brenton, Kristen Bullivant, Cloe Freeman, Vienna Orme-Williams, Manon Parry, Kit Powell, Danielle Uden, Louise Waite, Jess White, Esme Charteris, Josie McCann, and Jessica Stock.
ELIZABETH PRICE CURATES IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY
Saturday 28 January 2017 – Monday 1 May 2017
The exhibition was designed to create an immersive experience for the viewer, in which works are connected associatively, with ‘the slippery, fugitive logic of a dream’. Price staged the exhibition as ‘an austere melodrama’ exploring the psychological and formal power of the horizontal, in a vast repertoire of images depicting the reclining or recumbent body in varying states of weariness, stupor, reverie, grief, death, erotic transport and languor.
2016
FIONA BANNER: BUOYS BOYS
Saturday 24 September 2016 – Sunday 8 January 2017
In the sculptural performance Buoys Boys, five large inflatable full stops, each in a different font, float above the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion. This series of happenings, which take place throughout the duration of the exhibition, are documented in the film, Buoys Boys, which is shown as part of Fiona Banner’s solo exhibition of the same name.
PETER BLAKE: ALPHABETS, LETTERS & NUMBERS
Saturday 13 August 2016 – Sunday 27 November 2016
This stunning exhibition by Peter Blake comprised three print series, Alphabet (1991), An Alphabet (2007) and Appropriated Alphabets (2013), and a personally chosen selection of related original artworks.
RICHARD FORSTER: LEVITTOWN
Saturday 26 March 2016 – Sunday 5 June 2016
This exhibition of sculpture and drawings on paper was based on Forster’s 18-month study of Levittown, the 1947 suburban housing project in New York state, USA. The exhibition questioned how an architectural environment impacts on developing culture and sense of memory.
WILLEM SANDBERG: FROM TYPE TO IMAGE
Saturday 30 April 2016 – Sunday 4 September 2016
Willem Sandberg: from type to image showcased Sandberg’s entire body of work from the 1930s to the 1980s for the first time in the UK. The exhibition tells the story of how he transformed text into image to create a unique graphic language, including his use of ‘warm printing’ experimental typography and the incorporation of simple materials and reuse of existing print matter in his work. Sandberg’s distinctive designs are characterised by asymmetric typography created from fonts, ciphers and the rough contours of shapes torn out of paper.
THE NEW LINE: WORKS FROM THE JOBBING PRINTING COLLECTION
Saturday 10 December 2016 – Sunday 12 March 2017
Europe in the 1930s underwent enormous social, political and technological change. To capture some of these changes through contemporary commercial print, Philip James at the V&A’s National Art Library developed the ‘Jobbing Printing Collection’.
The New Line presents a selection of items from James’s collection, including lifestyle and trade magazines, beauty catalogues, tourism brochures and a packet for stockings.
2015
IN THE REALM OF OTHERS
Saturday 26 September 2015 – Sunday 3 January 2016
In the Realm of Others was a collaboration between Project Art Works and De La Warr Pavilion intended to question perceptions about the process of making art. Over forty-five large and small-scale paintings, drawings and sculptures – produced by fourteen makers with profound intellectual impairment – were presented in a living, evolving installation that offers a rare glimpse into unknowable, creative states of being.
LADYBIRD BY DESIGN
Saturday 24 January 2015 – Sunday 10 May 2015
In 2014 and early 2015, the De La Warr Pavilion displayed over 200 original illustrations covering a selection of Ladybird books from the late 1950s to early 1970s. Focusing on those books which reflected the world in which the reader lived, the exhibition featured selections from the People At Work series, Shopping With Mother, the Science and Nature series as well as the Well Loved Tales and Key Words series.
BRIDGET RILEY: THE CURVE PAINTINGS 1961-2014
Saturday 13 June 2015 – Sunday 6 September 2015
The exhibition was formed from a selection of over 30 paintings and studies from throughout Riley’s career, illustrating the artist’s close dedication to the interaction of form and colour by looking at a single motif.
CY TWOMBLY: QUATTRO STAGIONI
Saturday 24 October 2015 – Sunday 10 January 2016
The monumental cycle of paintings, Quattro Stagioni [Four Seasons], represents the four seasons by one of the great American painters of the second half of the 20th century, Cy Twombly (1928 – 2011).
Twombly, based for most of his life in Rome, often drew inspirations from literature, history and beauty he found in European culture. He adopted the new freedom found in the development of process-based American painting and translated these classical European references into layers of visual responses which were sensual and emotional, with an emphasis on mark making and calligraphy.
J.D ‘OKHAI OJEIKERE: HAIRSTYLES AND HEADDRESSES
Saturday 14 February 2015 – Sunday 19 April 2015
Hayward Touring presented the first UK touring exhibition of J.D ‘Okhai Ojeikere, widely regarded as one of the most important photographers to emerge from Africa in the last sixty years.
Born in Nigeria, Ojeikere took up photography in the 1950s, starting a relationship with an artistic form of expression that defined his life’s work. He ran a commercial studio and was involved in the emerging Nigerian Arts Council, but it was his Hairstyles series – a personal project began in 1968 – that brought international acclaim.
JOHN STEZAKER: FILM WORKS
Saturday 2 May 2015 – Sunday 19 July 2015
This exhibition presented three films by the artist – Horse (2012), Crowd (2013) and Cathedral (2013). The films are made up of a vast number of Stezaker’s personal collection of film stills, postcards and images from racehorse catalogues. They comprise discontinuous still images which are re-photographed and projected at 24 frames per second, without sound.
TOWARDS AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN
Saturday 8 August 2015 –Sunday 4 October 2015
This exhibition set out a new way of looking at graphic design history by focusing on four publications from the late-1960s to mid-1970s – Schmuck, POP, bRIAN and Assembling – designed by individuals and groups without any formal training of typography, graphic design or print production.
LYNN DENNISON: BORDER COUNTRY
Friday 6 February 2015 –Sunday 15 March 2015
Lynn Dennison’s collages use layers of found images along with her own photographs to explore our relationship with landscapes and our emotional response when the forces of nature enter our built environments. The creation of an artwork that can suggest the enormity of nature and the fear that this can induce is of particular interest to the artist.
2014
OTTO DIX
Commemorating the centenary of WW1, which began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28 1914, the exhibition presented a selection from the series Der Krieg (The War) 1924.
THE NAKEDS
Saturday 13 December 2014 –Sunday 8 February 2015
The Nakeds was a group exhibition that looks at drawings of the body exposed. The practice of drawing a naked body, either from the self, life model, reproduction or imagination, has provided the artist with the freedom to explore the inner self.
MAGNUM PHOTOS: ONE ARCHIVE, THREE VIEWS
Sunday 4 January 2015
For the first time in its history, the iconic photography agency Magnum opened its London office’s resin print archive to three contemporary practitioners. Guided by the former Magnum Photos archivist Nick Galvin, historian and anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards, photographer Hannah Starkey and artist Uriel Orlow were invited to reinterpret how social, cultural and political inclinations have shaped the content of the archive.
IVAN CHERMAYEFF: CUT AND PASTE
Saturday 19 July 2014 –Sunday 14 September 2014
The exhibition focused on the personal side of work, in the context of a family of artists and designers which is now extending to three generations and with participation from June 14, an architecture practive run by Ivan’s son Sam Chermayeff and his partner Johanne meyer-Grohbrugge.
I CHEER A DEAD MAN’S SWEETHEART
Saturday 15 March 2014 –
Sunday 29 June 2014
I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart was both a celebration and an exploration of painting in Britain today, presenting the recent work of twenty-one living artists whose practices span six decades.
The exhibition took its title from the last verse of the poem Is My Team Ploughing by A. E. Housman, first published in 1896. As a conversation between a dead man and his living friend who is now with the girlfriend he left behind, it serves as an allegory for the influence of the past and its evolving significance in contemporary painting practice.
2013
SHAUN GLADWELL: CYCLES OF RADICAL WILL
Sunday 23 June 2013
The exhibition embraced flux and transformation, reflecting the changing seasons during the exhibition. Over the course of five months, works are exchanged to offer a sequence of windows into Gladwell’s artistic practice, unconstrained by the limitations of a single exhibition project.
IAN BREAKWELL: KEEP THINGS AS THEY ARE
6 October 2012 – 13 January 2013
The exhibition comprised fifty works in all media spanning his career and will be presented in both gallery spaces. In Gallery 2, The Other Side (2002) is a double-screen video installation which used the architecture of the Pavilion as both its backdrop and subject. Accompanied by a gentle sound track of the sea, overlaid with a fragment of Schubert’s Nocturne in E Major, it is a slow motion of elderly couples from the local community waltzing on the balcony against the sunset. The film has been described as ‘utterly compelling’ and ‘incredibly beautiful that you are lulled into a state of hypnotic inertia’. The work was later acquired by Tate and has been exhibited nationwide.
MATT CALDERWOOD: EXPOSURE
Saturday 9 November 2013 –Sunday 23 February 2014
Exploring the physical properties of material and its transformative quality, Exposure Sculpture (2013) are geometric structures made from welded steel clothed in billboard paper. Located on the roof during the summer months, they have now been reassembled in the gallery space and reveal the results from the four months’ exposure to the elements during the outdoor installation prior to the exhibition.
2012
RICHARD WILSON: HANG ON A MINUTE LADS, I’VE GOT A GREAT IDEA…
Sunday 14 October 2012
Based upon the iconic final scene of the film The Italian Job, this feat of engineering saw a full-sized replica coach balanced on the DLWP’s rooftop. Eddie Izzard, Honorary Patron of DLWP, was the principal sponsor of the commission.
2011
WARHOL IS HERE
Saturday 24 September 2011 –Sunday 26 February 2012
The show was assembled from a selection of works from ARTIST ROOMS, (a new collection of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland for the nation), as well as those sourced from Tate collection, The British Museum, V&A, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery other private collections.
CATHERINE YASS
Saturday 25 June 2011 –Sunday 4 September 2011
Catherine Yass is a leading contemporary photographer and film-maker whose work captures the psychological impact of architectural space. The exhibition included recent work and a new commission Lighthouse (2011).
MOVING PORTRAITS
Sunday 27 March 2011
Moving Portraits explored the past sixty years of portraits in moving image by significant international artists practising in the field of film and video technology. By using this technology, the artist has expanded the language and notion of the portrait genre. The works in this exhibition were all experimental of their time and include well-known sitters and subjects as well as more personal portraits of friends and family.
JOHN CAGE
Saturday 16 April 2011 –Sunday 5 June 2011
This extraordinary exhibition was the first major retrospective in the UK of the visual art of American composer and artist John Cage (1912–1992).
John Cage was one of the leading avant-garde composers of the 20th century, most famous perhaps for his silent work of 1952, 4’33”. Cage was closely connected with art and artists throughout his long career.
2010
ANTONY GORMLEY: CRITICAL MASS
Sunday 26 September 2010
Critical Mass, one of Gormley’s best known works, is an installation made up of 60 lifesize cast iron body forms which was on display on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion.
