Earthly Delites at Hastings Contemporary

PodcastArt Exhibition2019-20

4 Feb

Hastings Contemporary starts of 2020 with new exhibitions and in this episode of the podcast, gallery director Liz Gilmore talks about the three exhibitions .

Earthly Delites is a solo show of Anne Ryan paintings in the large downstairs gallery. Ryan was on a fellowship at the British School at Rome back in 2016 where she was given time and space to immerse herself in her practice. It is while here that she found her work taking a new direction which is characteristic of the work she has become known for. Breaking up, canvasses and no longer constrained by the frame her work took on 3d forms. The ancient ruins in Rome and public baroque sculptures of writhing figures seen in every piazza in the city are evident in Ryan’s paintings. She likens the Bacchanalian forms of dancing figures as something we still see today in a nightclub in any city.

On painting she says - it only needs to make sense to you

The Studio at 4am is a show than Ryan was invited to curate. She has brought together 8 artists who have painting at the core of their practice but like Ryan are not confined by the traditional edges of the canvas. Artists include Freya Guest, Aimee Parrott, Andrew Child, Ross Taylor, Frances Burden, Rebecca Truscott-Elves and Xiao-Yang Li.

In the third exhibition running concurrently we see the work of Edward Burra, Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer and a selection of their paintings from the mid 1930s to the late 1950’s. This show, titled The Age of Turmoil presents works that share a sense of anxiety and discomfort that many people felt during this turbulent historical period.