Where creativity meets connection
With significant art collections, galleries, museums, and institutions founded and developed during the last century, modernism is now widely celebrated in Sussex and beyond. A new exhibition, taking place at Towner Eastbourne on Fri 23 May – Sun 28 Sept, offers new ways of experiencing both modernism and the region and reveals that there are many modernisms, many Sussexes, and many ways of harnessing the landscapes, cultures and histories of a place to reimagine how art should be made and life lived.
The exhibition is an ongoing provocation to explore the relationship between art, place, and politics over a period of more than one hundred years. Interweaving painting, sculpture, film, textiles, literature and music, this extensive exhibition will reveal that there is much more to be learned from the ways in which artists of different kinds drew on the capacities of their locations to promote psychic and social change.
With a long chronological span, from the late 19th century to the present, Sussex Modernism is a show of jostling perspectives and surprising juxtapositions. It includes artists associated with different modernist movements, those who opposed them, and those who came before and after modernism’s early twentieth-century heyday. Offering an alternative story of modernism, it features an array of countercultural artists from the 1960s to 1980s who flouted established tastes in their attempts to embrace the ‘new’ and ‘now’.
Where exhibitions about Sussex tend to highlight rural landscapes, this one also includes works by artists from urban locations, for instance, surreal collages and drawings created in Hove in the 1980s by Holocaust survivor Arnold Daghani. John Upton’s hallucinatory crowd-scene featuring Jimi
Hendrix and film-maker Jeff Keen (whose work is also in the show) is compared with a 1970s painting collectively made by the Art Workers Co-operative for a convalescence centre in Eastbourne. While the exhibition compares many, competing ideas about where creativity happens, it also draws attention to moments where common ground was found.
Stone sculptures by Jacob Epstein appear alongside life-size female goddesses by Edward Burne-Jones, Jennifer Binnie and Alexi Marshall. There are monumental artworks, such as one of the largest paintings Ivon Hitchens ever created. The show also makes visible lesser-known women artists such as Amy Sawyer, Mary Stormont and Elizabeth Andrews who had local or regional rather than national power. Among the historic objects, the work of contemporary artists, including John Stezaker, Becky Beasley and Kabe Wilson, demonstrate the continued influence of different modernisms.
The exhibition is curated by Hope Wolf (University of Sussex) and based on Wolf’s book Sussex Modernism (Yale University Press, 2025). Embedded within both the book and show is an original story about the ways in which art, cultures, and places outside of metropolitan centres have been seen. It spotlights divergent forms of creativity generated outside of London, but close enough to still feel its force. Assumptions about the ‘provincial’ are interrogated, and the idea of ‘new regionalism’ is introduced.
Wolf explains: “This exhibition asks what it means to look at works of art through a regional lens. To do so would at first seem to be in tension with the ethos of modernism which is often associated with internationalism. However, there is a more complex story to tell about the relationship between modernism and regional identities that we are exploring through the show. It will also propose that in times of crisis, art became essential not only to imagine alternative futures but to sustain hopes of any future at all.”
Towner Eastbourne presents Sussex Modernism on Fri 23 May – Sun 28 Sept 2025.
Main image: Edward Wadsworth - Sussex Bypass - William Evans and Bangor University.jpg
SALT Staff Writer
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