HASTINGS.- This January, Hastings Contemporary is holding the first major UK exhibition of Irish artist, Anne Ryan, leading its ambitious 2020 exhibitions programme, and featuring alongside a retrospective of rarely seen work by Edward Burra, Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer, and a showcase of early career artists in the vanguard of art making.

For Anne Ryan: Earthly Delites, Ryan created a new installation occupying the entirety of Hasting Contemporary’s main ground floor gallery space. Taking inspiration from Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights, Ryan has curated a ‘pleasure garden’ of work assembled from throughout her career that invites visitors to wander around and get lost in her work, subtly insinuating ourselves directly into her paintings.

Ryan is renowned for her ‘cutouts’ - highly coloured, constructed paintings made from card, collage, canvas, ceramic and metal that focus on figures engaged in a variety of physical activities - dancing, posing, swimming, frolicking in the woods, even cutting loose in a mosh pit - inspired as much by nightclubs and cinema as by classical figurative painting and sculpture.

Ryan has said about the cutouts: “I love the freedom they give me. Suddenly you're not tied to the four walls of a canvas … It's almost like not painting. I say to my students: stop painting and then let's paint. And it's that idea that we stop assuming what we know about painting and then let's do something, OK? Let's make then. And that's when I'm really engaged with.“

Liz Gilmore, Director, Hastings Contemporary, comments: “Anne Ryan’s boundless creativity, couldn’t be more evident than in this debut public gallery solo exhibition. Ryan’s takeover of the largest gallery space with her trademark painted cardboard cutout figures demonstrate her limitless energy and talent that I hope will surprise and delight our visitors. We are equally thrilled to have on show several powerful parallel exhibitions, including world class historic loans from private and public collections in The Age of Turmoil, and the incredible work of some of Anne’s peers, eight of the most exciting emerging artists working today.”

Anne Ryan was born in Limerick, Ireland, and studied at Limerick School of Art and Birmingham University, and was Abbey Fellow in Painting at The British School at Rome in 2016. She has taught at a number of leading UK art schools, including Turps, and has exhibited work at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, CAPC Bordeaux, and Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt. Anne lives and works in London and is represented by greengrassi Gallery.

MOD BRIT MASTERPIECES, CUTTING EDGE ARTIST-MAKERS, QUENTIN BLAKE RETURNS
January 2020 also marks the opening of four additional exhibitions at Hastings Contemporary.

The Age of Turmoil: Burra, Spencer, Sutherland features rarely seen work by three seminal Modern British artists: Edward Burra (1905-1976) - whose hometown of Rye became a strategic centre for military activity from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s - and Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), both of whom served during World War II as official war artists.

The work chosen for The Age of Turmoil - traversing the Depression of the interwar years through to post-WW2 austerity - illuminates an eerily familiar sense of the anxiety, discomfort and fear that many people felt during this turbulent period of history, with its global conflicts, rising populism, economic stagnation, and a resurgent pessimism about humanity’s future prospects, mirroring many of the crises of our present age.

Curated by Anne Ryan, The Studio at 4 a.m. showcases work by eight emerging contemporary artists in the vanguard of art making: Anna Brass, Frances Burden, Andrew Child, Freya Guest, Xiao-Yang Lim Aimee Parrott, Ross Taylor and Rebecca Truscott-Elves. Each artist chosen for the show hand-builds and crafts their work using multiple media and methods, employing a process of intense, joyful and prolonged making to push themselves into a deep but at the same time ‘switched off’ state of mind where their best work gets done: the metaphorical 4 a.m. of ‘deep-making’ that the artists attain in their approach to their work.

Quentin Blake returns in his role as Artist Patron of Hastings Contemporary with Airborne, the latest part of an ongoing series of exhibitions created especially for the gallery, and featuring whimsical flying creations and madcap characters in his inimitable style that will delight young and old alike.

Finally, Hastings Contemporary will be exhibiting Drawing Life, featuring artwork produced during life drawing sessions with local artists, carers and people living with dementia, as part of our ongoing Wellbeing programme. Inclusivity is at the heart of Hastings Contemporary’s ethos and we continue to ensure that our programming represents diverse artists and makers who have made the gallery their creative home.