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
Cosmos: The Art of Observing Space
until 19 April 2026
A major art and science exhibition celebrating our enduring fascination with space. Bringing together contemporary and historic artists, the exhibition features an extraordinary range of work inspired by the cosmos.
Elemental
until 8 March 2026 – Kenny Gallery
This exhibition brings together works by four RWA Academicians that trace deep and individual responses to the natural world. Each work holds fragments of place that move beyond representation to connect with elements that are both intimate and universal.
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Compiled by Sue Quirk and Laurel Smart
1) EARTH, STONE AND PAPER: GROUP SHOW
5 – 23 FEBRUARY, HIDDEN GALLERY, BRISTOL
Hidden Gallery is exhibiting original, hand-signed prints by Richard Long, Henry Moore and Eduardo Chillida. Known internationally for their engagement with the natural world, each artist has made an indelible impression on contemporary art. Turner Prize winner Richard Long built an artistic practice around the simple act of walking, exploring how gestures and earthly materials can shape our understanding of nature. Revered British sculptor Henry Moore took inspiration from Yorkshire’s rolling landscape, imitating its peaks and valleys through the contours of his figurative sculptures. Eduardo Chillida, one of Spain’s most significant sculptors, carved and articulated space through monumental works that interact with the sea, land and architecture. Preview 12pm – 5pm on Saturday 21st February.
2) WILLIAM SCOTT: BEAUTY IN PLAINNESS
UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY, MUSEUM OF SOMERSET, TAUNTON, SOMERSET
Experience the bold, abstract works of British art icon William Scott. Three major paintings from the Tate collection are on display in this exclusive Spotlight Loan exhibition. William Scott CBE RA (1913-1989) was a pioneering abstract painter, best known for his distinctive still life and landscape compositions. After settling in Somerset in the 1940s, he taught at the Bath Academy of Art for ten years and became a key figure in the post-war British art scene. In the 1950s, Scott developed a close friendship with American artist Mark Rothko, who visited and stayed with him in Somerset in 1959.
This exhibition features three large-scale works from this pivotal period in Scott’s career, offering a rare chance to experience his bold, expressive art up close. An animated film further explores the artist’s vision and life in Somerset.
3) FROME PRINTMAKERS: IMPRESSION
UNTIL 15 FEBRUARY, BLACK SWAN ARTS, FROME, SOMERSET
The Frome Printmakers workshop runs as an artist Co-operative and has been a local resource for open access printmaking since 1997. This exciting exhibition aims to highlight the breadth of both style and techniques in printmaking, highlighting the work of 10 artists including Steve Clarkson who chairs the group.
Rooted in landscape Sarah Du Feu creates abstract multilayered prints combining fluid monoprints with more rigid linear marks through etching plates. Martin Martin believes there is always a reason, a history, a consequence, a tale. Landscape becomes a metaphor for the human condition.
Sue Cook references the open and urban landscape and natural organic forms through the creation of both representational and abstracted images through the processes of lithography, collagraphs and monotypes. Sophie Pearson’s prints weave textured layers through etching, woodcut, Mokulito, collagraph and lino printing and celebrate emotional connections with nature.
Stephen Forster uses wood with an interesting textured grain to print, looking to see how the results could be further developed into an acceptable image. Steve Clarkson crafts still-life mezzotints and monotypes, blending light and dark in rich chiaroscuro. His observational eye captures retro toys with subtle detail and often with subtle humour.
Charlotte Moore references a painting, a place or an object, her heavy and dark carborundum prints aiming to catch the essence of what had first attracted her. Elizabeth Irving specialises in lithography on stone as well as etching and mono printing, and explores the forms and cycles of plant life and landscapes particular to SW England. Canadian born Jen Chow combines the qualities of line and space, carving into lino and wood to create images influenced by her work as a gardener. Liza Saunders silk screen prints draw on a range of print making skills that reveal and share the inner joyfulness of her subject.
4) ELLEN WILES & ARUN SOOD: SHIFTING WATERSCAPES
UNTIL 28 FEBRUARY, THELMA HULBERT GALLERY, HONITON, DEVON
Exhibition exploring the value of water in our landscapes at a time of environmental change through the sensory experience of different bodies of water. On display will be varied and immersive works involving sound, story, moving image, visual art, and other mixed media.
Created by multidisciplinary artists Ellen Wiles and Arun Sood, the works explore various watery ecologies in the UK, from rivers and lakes in South West England to tidal islands in the Outer Hebrides. They explore issues of water resilience and nature restoration, and themes of movement and memory, degradation and renewal, and relationships between human and more-than-human lives. Each work has been created in response to a specific watery place: the Otterhead Lakes (Blackdown Hills), Porlock Vale (Exmoor), Countess Wear (Exeter), and the tidal island of Vallay (The Outer Hebrides). All provoke questions around the entanglements between these waterscapes and their inhabitants, histories, and imagined futures.
Ellen Wiles is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and academic. A Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, she is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Resilience in Environment, Water and Waste (CREWW), leading a two-year project, Storying Water, which seeks to engage diverse audiences imaginatively with water system resilience.
Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian artist, writer, musician, and academic. Through words, sound, moving image and collage, his works explore various intersecting themes including cultural memory, diasporic identities, colonial histories, and climate futures.
5) JEREMY DIGGLE: OUT OF TIME
UNTIL 28 FEBRUARY, BRIDPORT ARTS, BRIDPORT, DORSET
An exhibition of Jeremy Diggle’s exuberant, highly coloured abstract paintings.
A series of interrelated pictorial narratives completed over the last 3 years, the work combines a conceptual idea about the activity of painting as a form of abstract mapmaking with the artist’s internal narrative of lived experience, expressed through marks and colour. Each individual painting has been developed over an extended period of time, sometimes taking 4 or 5 years to complete. Jeremy Diggle’s practice involves working across multiple pictures at the same time, allowing composition and colour to migrate from one canvas to another. This approach to picture making has been compared to that of composing music. If you think of each painting in this exhibition as a tune or track, then in this case the entire exhibition comprises a concept album.
Jeremy’s paintings are literally wrestled ‘out of time’. This concept is embodied through action, personal reflection, formal consideration, and maturation. The work is built with multiple marks and colour decisions, often separated by days, weeks or even months. The pictures are then left at various stages of completion for a year or more before being revisited and continued to a point of resolution. Jeremy questions the relationship he has established between his own practice and contemporary art. He is very aware that his own art making may well be slowly drifting into the past, out of fashion, irrelevant and out of time. He asks the question “Is this language of painting still contemporary and relevant?”
6) CLARE TRENCHARD & BINNY MATHEWS: JOURNEY – TWO ARTISTS, ONE STUDIO
UNTIL 7 MARCH, SLADERS YARD, WEST BAY, BRIDPORT, DORSET
Four years ago, two acclaimed artists embarked on a project which would change the way each of them worked. When successful portrait painter Binny Mathews had the idea of painting another artist at work, observing their most private creative moments and recreating the atmosphere of absolute concentration within the studio, she approached her friend the sculptor Clare Trenchard. The arrangement continued for four transformational years.
Sculptor Clare Trenchard – whose spirited sculpture in bronze captures the essence of animals and wild hare-humans – gradually began to explore making human figures in ceramic inspired by Moroccan travellers and nomadic people in harsh landscapes. The electrifying ‘Representatives’ are taller than life-size with flapping robes, headdresses and undefined faraway faces. In maquette they are also a delight whether gathering in groups or single. Clare’s drawings revel in the distinctive humorous, decorative qualities of travellers on donkey, old women gossiping in the marketplace, figures in the dust and wind. While other drawings define the thrilling figures she has developed as sculpture.
Binny Mathews is a portrait painter she works largely to commission. Encountering day after day the utterly unselfconscious, steady seriousness with which Clare works gave Binny the key to unlock the dedication with which she painted in her gifted twenties as she rose to high acclaim. Binny’s journey has been a freeing, a renewal and a reconnecting to the clarity of her voice. Allowing the way she lays on paint and her sense of colour, light and form to take over has produced paintings with a new energy and lightness. By treating the seemingly chaotic environment of the sculptor’s studio as an abstracted landscape, Binny’s paintings reveal the quiet beauty of the creative space.
7) LIFE LINES: GROUP SHOW
6-8 FEBRUARY, HOURS GALLERY, BRISTOL
Life Lines is a love letter to the ‘Lovely Life Drawing’ community, exploring how creative communities can facilitate the building of relationships, the sharing of disciplines, and, in doing so, shape us as artists.
Featuring a curation of work from artists Connor Cox, Rosanna Foster, Sophie Howard, Nick Howlett, Nigel Shipley and friends – and thoughts on the practice from the community.
Launch event Friday 6th February 6-9 pm. Open to the public Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th 11 am – 5 pm. Free.
WATCH OUT FOR
- GELID: GROUP EXHIBITION UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY This mixed-artist exhibition for the winter season showcases works from the Andelli personal collection alongside the gallery’s stable of artists and makers. ANDELLI ART, WELLS https://www.andelliart.com/gelid-exhibition-works
- EMMA TALBOT: EVERYTHING IS ENERGY UNTIL 8 FEBRUARY The artist leads us through a rich eco-system of works – including silk painting installations, intimate drawings, sculptural forms and animation – each exploring the complexity of our relationship with nature, technology and the world around us. ARNOLFINI, BRISTOL https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/emmatalbot/
- WILLIAM COBBING: DESPISED MUD, I LOVE YOU UNTIL 15 FEBRUARY Rooted in sculpture, William Cobbing’s work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance and installation. BURTON AT BIDEFORD, DEVON https://www.burtonartgallery.co.uk/exhibitions-activities/william-cobbing-despised-mud-i-love-you/?portfolioCats=12
- NICOLA DAVIS: ART HEALS UNTIL 21 FEBRUARY A thought-provoking mixed media exhibition by award-winning textile artist Nicola Davis. POUND ARTS, CORSHAM https://poundarts.org.uk/whats-on/nicola-davis-art-heals/
- BRISTOL PRIDE X MARTIN PARR UNTIL 29 MARCH A showcase of the city’s colourful Parade March, by the late, great photographer. Images in the exhibition capture all the different walks of life that come to celebrate and protest at Bristol Pride. BRISTOL MUSEUM & ART GALLERY, BRISTOL https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/bristol-pride-x-martin-parr/
The Floating Circle 