Past Exhibitions
Browse our archive of exhibitions from the past 5 years
Browse our archive of exhibitions from the past 5 years
2023
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.
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.
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).
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.