Blog

Sussex-based artist Poppy Jones will present her first institutional solo exhibition at Towner Eastbourne in Spring 2026. Best known for her timeless still life paintings, Jones will debut several new works that focus our attention on the subtle poetry of the everyday. Working on a scale that feels true to life, subjects range from closely cropped sections of clothing and glowing reading lamps to small fruits and cut flowers - fading from full bloom to inevitable decay. Often photographed in the artist’s home, these images invite deeper considerations of memory, life, death, and the passage of time.

Jones works on cotton, silk and suede canvases cut from her own garments or from vintage clothing sourced online. These materials are often true to the images themselves as well as being connected to her life.⁠ Fingerprints visible on the suede surface of works such as White Tulips (Friday) and Last Days (both 2023), resemble smudges on touchscreen devices - an intentional reference to image sharing in the digital age.

Spanning the years from the Great Depression through the Second World War and beyond, Comrades in Art is set to be the most in-depth exhibition on the anti-fascist Artists International Association (AIA) ever staged. It will bring to light the largely untold story of how British artists came together to respond to a world in crisis. The exhibition will highlight the political pressures that shaped modern art in Britain, showing how artists put aside stylistic differences and united on an extraordinary scale to oppose fascism and fight for cultural freedom and democracy. The exhibition has been made possible through extensive new archival and collection-based research by curator and author Andy Friend, whose work was recently published by Thames & Hudson in his book Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism, 1933–1943.

The book centres on the AIA, founded in the 1930s in response to economic hardship and rising political extremism, by a group of young, underemployed artists and designers led by Misha Black and his friends Cliff Rowe and Pearl Binder. Within two years the AIA had won the allegiance of some of Britain’s best-known artists including Henry Moore, Vanessa Bell, Laura Knight and Augustus John, and held a major exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War in Soho Square. In 1937 they staged the first British Artists’ Congress, foreshadowing many progressive post-war developments, even as they organized against the prospect of renewed global conflict.

The exhibition will highlight the life and work of 11 members of the founding generation of the AIA: Peggy Angus, Pearl Binder, James Boswell, James Fitton, Margaret Fitton, James Holland, Percy Horton, Peter Laszlo Peri, Betty Rea, Cliff Rowe and Nan Youngman. Their work will be shown alongside works by prominent AIA exhibiting artists including Ithell Colquhoun, Dame Laura Knight, Paul Nash and Lucien Pissaro, who supported the organisation and its campaigns for peaceful and cultural development and international understanding.

The third collaboration between Andy Friend and Towner Eastbourne, it follows the success of the exhibitions and publications Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship (2017-2018) and John Nash: the Landscape of Love and Solace (2021).

Commissioned by Towner Eastbourne, Rana Begum will create a new public artwork for Eastbourne, which will be situated on the seafront end of shopping and hospitality street Victoria Place.

The work will comprise of eight tall, vertical panes of toughened coloured glass that protrude from the ground in a zigzag formation. The interaction between the natural light and the glass will cast geometric reflections and shadows, creating playful interventions in the surrounding environment.

The work will evolve with the changing natural light, transforming across the days and seasons, capitalising on Eastbourne’s open skies and the multiple angles of sunlight offered by the seafront location. The planes of glass will act as a sundial, with the coloured geometry shifting as its shadows expand and contract, painting the surroundings and the bodies of passersby. This new work will form part of a series of works by Begum that began with her 2018 work No.814, installed at Frieze Sculpture Park, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery and Albion Barn. It will be the largest in the series to date.

In July 2026, Danish artist Cecilia Fiona will present a major new body of work at Towner Eastbourne in her first institutional solo exhibition in the UK. Drawing inspiration from microbiology, quantum physics and processes of transformation, Fiona will create an immersive installation of new sculptures and paintings.

Fiona is based in Copenhagen and works across sculpture, painting, costume and performance to create an interconnected ecosystem where each medium evolves from the other. Using organic materials such as paper pulp, shells, branches, rabbit-skin glue, jute, loofah and natural pigments, Fiona explores the symbiotic relationship between the body and the earth.

Towner Eastbourne will present the first major UK institutional solo exhibition in nearly 20 years by celebrated British artist Ryan Gander. Opening in November 2026, this ambitious exhibition will feature new and existing work.

Ryan Gander has established an international reputation through artworks that materialise in many different forms – from sculpture to film, writing, graphic design, installation, performance and more. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander’s work involves a questioning of language and knowledge, as well as a reinvention of both the modes of appearance and the creation of an artwork. His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, or a network with multiple connections and the fragments of an embedded story. It is ultimately a set of hidden clues to be deciphered, encouraging viewers to make their own associations and invent their own narrative in order to unravel the complexities staged by the artist.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK will come to Towner in November 2026. The exhibition will centre on a major new commission from the artist incorporating elements of painting, drawing, ceramics, furniture and sound to create a contemplative, multi-sensory environment in the gallery.

Meditating on Blackness, queerness, femininity and healing, Yearwood-Dan creates spaces of joy, abundance and inclusion. Singing with colour, her work is alive with swirling botanicals, diaristic writings, song lyrics, gold leaf, beading and ceramic petals, combining art historical references with pop culture.

The commission and exhibition is co-produced by Towner Eastbourne, the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, and Arnolfini. This will be at the Whitworth (17 April to 18 October) and will travel to Arnolfini (27 February to 23 May 2027).

The Ravilious Collection at Towner Eastbourne is the most extensive display of work by the much-loved British artist Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942) anywhere. This bespoke space features an expanded display of over 100 of Ravilious’ works from the Towner Collection, showcasing the prodigious output of one of Eastbourne’s most celebrated artists. The Gallery features some of his best-loved works, including his depictions of iconic local landscapes Beachy Head and Cuckmere Haven (both 1939). It also showcases wood blocks, preparatory drawings, prints, publications and ceramics by Ravilious (including rarely, or never before seen works), as well as works by some of his closest friends and peers, including Edward Bawden, Peggy Angus and Tirzah Garwood, who married Ravilious in 1930.

The gallery traces Eric Ravilious’ life and celebrates the breadth of his career from his early days as a student and later a teacher at Eastbourne School of Art to his work as a war artist which ultimately resulted in his early death in service at the age of 39, while accompanying a Royal Air Force sea rescue mission which failed to return to its base.