The best art exhibitions coming up in Bristol and the Westcountry – selected by the Friends of the RWA…
Here’s our pick of the best art exhibitions and events happening in and around Bristol and the south west – including a look ahead to upcoming features….
AT THE RWA
RWA Biennial Open 2025: Paper Works
25 Jan – 27 Apr 2025
Paper Works, the RWA’s Biennial exhibition, is all about paper. Selected from an open submission it celebrates paper as a surface for drawing and printmaking and as a sculptural material. The work in the exhibition ranges from powerful visceral charcoal drawings to hangings so delicate as they move in the still air that it almost seems as if they do not exist. There are tiny intimate paintings, exquisite fine line drawings on costly cotton rag paper and expressive vibrant works on packaging cardboard and paper animal feed sacks. If you love paper you will love this show and if you don’t know anything about it come with the RWA on a voyage of discovery.
Paule Vézelay: Living Lines
25 Jan – 27 Apr 2025
Discover the internationally important work of Paule Vézelay, a key figure of 20th-century British abstract art. Her vivid explorations of colour and line fill this retrospective exhibition at the RWA – the largest solo show of Vézelay’s work in over 40 years.
Flora
15 Jan – 09 March 2025
Flowers, plants and botanical-inspired artworks fill the Kenny Gallery in this joyous exhibition curated by Malcolm Ashman RWA and Stephen Jacobson RWA. Alongside recent works by Academicians Cynthia Lear and Charlotte Price, discover rarely-seen pieces from the RWA Collection by celebrated artists including Derek Balmer, Mary Fedden, Alastair Michie and George Tute.
Image top: Paule Vézelay – Growing Forms (1946)
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Compiled by Sue Quirk and Laurel Smart
1) IAN RICHARDSON: A RETROSPECTIVE
UNTIL 14 MARCH, BLACK SWAN ARTS, FROME, SOMERSET
Showing examples of 50 years of an artist’s work. A fascinating insight into the development of vision and method. This unusual exhibition will explore a lifetime of an artist’s work. Ian Richardson, 1938-2023, a respected local artist, was an honours graduate of the West of England College of Art, Bristol, and a long-term member of Bath Society of Artists. He exhibited widely in Wales and the west country. As well as teaching in schools and colleges, Ian became an inspirational adult education tutor. His own work is innovative and intriguing, often using rural, urban and seaside environments as settings, but, in his own words, “always returning to the human figure.”
2) HOURS, BRISTOL: 2 EXHIBITIONS
MIKE STUART: THE DARK AGES – UNTIL 16 MARCH
NIGEL SHIPLEY & SOPHIE HOWARD: THESE TWO – 21 – 23 MARCH
Mike Stuart: The Dark Ages – created as a direct emotional reaction to the current age of anxiety over the last two years, this series of monochromatic painted biro drawings tries to find sense in an unpredictable, precarious world. A stream of consciousness feed, aspiring to explore higher states, but invaded by intrusive thoughts of industrial genocide, growing fascism, rampant consumerism, unaccountable oligarchy, media overload and social isolation, while the world careers blindly towards climate breakdown… Figures scratched in jagged black outlines dug furiously into the paper, jostle with ink-washed shadows in broken urban landscapes. Sharp-edged, gritty, and distorted, but also lyrical, dreamlike, and darkly humorous; the pictures are striving to evolve the ideal form to encompass everything we feel in these dark ages.
Launch Friday 28th February 6-9 pm Saturday 1st & Sunday 2nd March 11am-5pm. thereafter by arrangement until 16th March.
Nigel Shipley & Sophie Howard: These Two – New paintings and sculptures from Nigel Shipley & Sophie Howard. This exhibition is part of the Bristol Gallery Weekend. Nigel & Sophie are both artists and run HOURS, a gallery and event space in the Christmas Steps Arts Quarter of Bristol. The Bristol Gallery Weekend allows a rare chance for Nigel and Sophie to show some of their own work together. Expect abstract paintings and a mix of sculpture both figurative and not. Launch Friday 21st March 6-9 pm. Open Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd 11am-5pm Free.
3) WOMEN BY WOMEN.2: GROUP SHOW
7 – 12 MARCH, CENTRESPACE STUDIOS & GALLERY, BRISTOL
Women by Women.2 is an exhibition returning for its second year to show work by over 20 female and non-binary artists, taking place in the week of International Women’s Day. Showing work in diverse mediums, including drawing, painting, print, sculpture, textiles, ceramics and photography, ‘Women by Women.2’ tells the stories of these artists from where they stand. This collection of work explores the joys, pains and complexities of womanhood through a variety of personal and communal perspectives on identity, relationship and body.
This exhibition is a celebration of personalities, stories and lived experiences, and an ode to our community, support networks and our most treasured relationships. 20% of all proceeds will go to Women for Women International’s Palestine Crisis Response. Artists include: Martha Opher, Sanni Pyhanniska, Caitlin Booton, Flavia Pinto, Ellie Shipman and Ana Clark Ribeiro.
4) RACHEL RECKITT: CHANCE ENCOUNTERS
UNTIL 15 MARCH, THE MUSEUM OF SOMERSET, TAUNTON
A retrospective of paintings, sculpture and wood engravings by the West Somerset artist Rachel Reckitt (1908-1995.) Rachel Reckitt was a 20th-century modernist artist who lived and worked in West Somerset for over 60 years. She was a unique artistic talent who worked entirely on her own terms, moving across subject matter, styles and media, even training as a blacksmith when she was in her 60s. Her lifelong-artistic endeavour, inspired by her astute observations of people and places, spans avant-garde painting, sculpture, wood engraving and blacksmithing. The exhibition will include loans from public and private collections alongside new acquisitions by the South West Heritage Trust.
5) TONY MARTIN & CHRIS BINDING: DRAWN TO LINE
18 – 29 MARCH, WELLS & MENDIP MUSEUM, WELLS, SOMERSET
Paintings, drawings and collage reflecting a shared interest in the division of pictorial space through line, colour and texture. The exhibition features recent work made in response to music by Gavin Bryars and the Annunciation paintings of Fra Angelico.
6) ANDREW HARDWICK: UNCULTIVATED LAND
UNTIL 29 MARCH, ANIMA MUNDI GALLERY, ST IVES, CORNWALL
‘Uncultivated Land’ continues to demonstrate Andrew Hardwick’s ongoing concern with, and depictions of, the contemporary landscape. The exhibition is another chapter or ongoing documentation of his experience, locale and our ongoing treatment of it. Inspiration continues to be gathered from a specifically intimate and deep rooted relationship with ‘place’, cultivated through a heritage where his family’s farm adjoined the Bristol Channel. First dissected by the building of the motorway and then again by expansion of the docks, most of what Hardwick grew up with has now gone. This story remains typical of all too many locations across the country and further afield, which continue to experience ongoing dramatic transition in the name of progress…
In a very literal sense Hardwick has witnessed his personal history and the intertwined landscape of his childhood, become fractured, buried and now lost. Remaining land, fenced off, now awaits development with much of it so heavily polluted that it could no longer be used for crops. This same area is infused by the light of the nearby sea, coloured by countless years of pollution from its industrial neighbours. Hardwick’s new paintings are of places both witnessed and places envisioned. They are simultaneously pertinent, nostalgic and prophetic, reflecting the role of the romantic tradition of painters such a John Constable and Paul Nash. These are ghost like paintings, where these edge-land and wilderness zones can’t ever quite escape the subtle reminders of our human interference which subverts or jostles with the pastoral.
7) THE LANDSCAPE AN ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE: GROUP EXHIBITION
UNTIL 29 MARCH, CREATIVE INNOVATION CENTRE, MEMORIAL HALL, TAUNTON
An exhibition of artworks celebrating the landscape created by the following artists: Jenny Graham, Leo Davey, Adam Grose, Keith Crocker, Liz Gregory and Fritz Duffy.
The artists share their unique perspectives on the spaces and environments around them, opening up various visual dialogues through their paintings and mixed media compositions. They explore colour, form, tone and texture using a wide range of mediums and techniques to visually capture and convey their emotional response to views, spaces and places.
This exhibition offers a glimpse of an artist’s unique take on the world and asks questions about our relationship with the landscape and the conversations it creates. Each image captures the magic and beauty of our surroundings. A visual treat.
WATCH OUT FOR
- CLAIRE GLADSTONE: PAY ATTENTION TO THE GAPS UNTIL 26 MARCH This new show offers the visitor multiple opportunities to reflect on the nature of memory, inviting fresh perspectives on how we hold personal story. PLOUGH ARTS CENTRE, DEVON https://www.theploughartscentre.org.uk/exhibition/claire-gladstone-pay-attention-gap
The Floating Circle 