Autumn At Towner Gallery
Margaret Mellis, Self-portrait in Yellow Dress, 1950.
Dates for the Diary
1st October 2021
Film Screening With Q&A
Towner Cinema is pleased to be hosting Jarman Award shortlisted artist Georgina Starr, who will present a special screening of her film Quarantaine, followed by a Q&A.
The Award, inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman, recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of UK-based artist filmmakers. This will be the only in-person screening by one of the shortlisted artists. The event is free to attend, but booking is required so follow the below links to book in during your stay at Port.
Quarantaine
16th October – 30th January 2021
Melissa Gordon
Towner Gallery Eastbourne is pleased to present a series of new works by Melissa Gordon. The presentation, Liquid Gestures, will be the largest institutional exhibition of work by the artist to date.
Gordon is a British and American artist based in Brussels whose practice, as a painter, writer and organiser, is concerned with the body, movement and painting through the lens of feminism.
Liquid Gestures invites an examination of modern art histories, ideas of authorship, and the appropriation of certain ‘gestures’. In recent works, a grid, mesh or chainlink fence is the first image silkscreened directly onto the canvas, creating a framework that plays host to an array of intriguing references. Photographs and texts relating to her research are then painted or printed onto the surface, while outlines and silhouettes of painting tools, clothing and domestic objects slip over and under colourful swathes of paint. Traversing between figuration and abstraction, these brushstrokes and pools of colour have been re-painted and reproduced from the incidental mark-making on Gordon’s studio wall with an almost forensic examination of gesture.
Gordon invites us to consider the significance and influence of artists such as Janet Sobel in relation to the drip painting and Dada poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in relation to the readymade. Their contributions to art history have been eclipsed in a culture of gender inequality that is noticeably persistent, even today.
16th October – 30th January 2021
Margaret Mellis
This autumn, Towner brings you Modernist Constructs - the first exhibition in over a decade by British artist Margaret Mellis (1914-2009), one of the first and last survivors of the group of modernist artists that came together in St Ives, Cornwall in the 1940s.
In 1939, aware of impending war, the artists Margaret Mellis and her husband Adrian Stokes relocated from London to St Ives. Their move would become a significant catalyst in the formation of The St Ives School, which also included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham. The school is heavily aligned with the story of British Modernism, with many of the artists becoming well-known. Margaret Mellis however remains largely overlooked so this is exhibition is an opportunity to shine a spotlight on an accomplished artist.
The strength of Mellis’ work lies in her confident and relentless exploration of colour and form both on canvas and through her re-appropriation of objects. Modernist Constructs introduces and reveals Mellis’ artistic accomplishments, especially her contemplative yet playful driftwood constructions that dominated the final twenty years of her life and work, now often seen as the ‘culmination’ of her practice.
For more information on Towner Gallery please head to their website and make it a port of call during your stay in Eastbourne.