In the 1930s, artist and designer Peggy Angus transformed a derelict cottage on the South Downs into a creative refuge for friends like Eric Ravilious, John Piper and Helen Binyon. Amid the rugged beauty of Sussex, Ravilious discovered the clarity and confidence that defined his mature style. Furlongs became a symbol of artistic freedom, camaraderie and experimentation—its influence still echoing through the collections at Towner Eastbourne today.

Elisabeth Frink’s Walking Madonna strides away from Salisbury Cathedral, dignified suffering etched into her middle-aged face. Cast in bronze, she seems anything but static. Her forward motion is palpable, her grief kinetic. Is she fleeing the trauma of bereavement, or walking toward some hard-won reckoning? Frink, as ever, left the question open. The sculpture, all coiled resolve, exudes an aura of stoic endurance. This is no geometry of fear – it’s a geometry of compassion.

A field in West Sussex, bordered by ancient woodland, lies fallow… but for a curious jaggedy monument. Imagine if MC Escher had redesigned a Mesopotamian ziggurat, and you’re halfway there.

In the summer of 1933 the 28-year-old painter Edward Burra, living with his parents in the village of Playden, near Rye in East Sussex, wandered out of the house, seemingly heading for town. His mother thought he’d gone to buy a packet of cigarettes. In fact, he was bound for New York. He didn’t return for three months. 

Pallant House Gallery’s excellent new exhibition Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, features British artists’ depictions of other British artists over the last 125 years. It’s a great concept: artist and subject tend to be deeply connected, as friends or lovers. This results in remarkably intimate, nuanced depictions.

Maro Gorky at Saatchi Gallery and Long & Ryle.

It’s time to give contemporary women artists a fair crack of the whip.

Textile art is as old as the hills, but retains its vitality in the digital age.

Tate Modern’s engaging new show Electric Dreams examines how groups of innovative artists used science and technology in their practice between the end of WW2 and the advent of the internet.

British Art Fair Co-Founder and Director, Gay Hutson, shares her memories of 40 years running art fairs.

Has Long and Ryle got bigger? No, the Pimlico gallery hasn’t had an extension: they are currently showing the latest exhibition of the painter John Monks, a modern master of perspective.

‘Potty for it!’ gushed an Elle Magazine headline in October 2022, describing ‘the new wave of ceramics that have reached cult status’. And the jaunty pot puns didn’t stop there: ‘as designers blur the lines between art and function,’ continued the fashion mag’s on-form sub-editor, ‘it seems everyone’s got the hots for pots.’

Filmmaker and ‘digitalist’ Rebekah Tolley-Georgiou is curating a cutting-edge digital art exhibition for British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery. Here she explains to Alex Leith how advances in technology have given the art world its latest ‘ism’.

British Art Fair has teamed up with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust to organise an exciting new show. On display throughout the 2024 fair at Saatchi Gallery, the Trust will exhibit a selection of Barns-Graham paintings, including late-career prints and three original works on paper from her ‘Glacier’ series.

In May this year, Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s 1945 oil painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold at Sotheby’s New York for a staggering $28.5 million, the highest sum ever achieved at auction by a female British painter. To put this in context, no painting by Salvador Dalí has attracted such a price tag.

The British public’s horrified reaction to the sickening criminal felling last autumn of one of Britain’s best-loved natural landmarks – the famous sycamore near Once Brewed on Hadrian’s Wall – is testament to the country’s deep-seated love of trees.

The founding President of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds dismissed still life painting as a minor genre, lower in the pecking order than historical paintings, landscapes and portraits. And to a certain extent, this stigma still lingers. It’s just something landscape painters do to fill the time when it’s raining, right?

Wrong.

The second major show at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece, an Untold Story, raises more questions than it answers.

Highlights of British artists at public art galleries this winter.

Every December, until his death in 2000, the London-based artist, Euan Uglow, would think up a new design, and hand-produce around 300 cards to send out to friends and family.

This Uglow card is among a collection on show at Austin/Desmond’s viewing room until January 12, alongside works designed by David Jones, Alexander Mackenzie, Dennis Mitchell, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson, Mary Martin and Viola Paterson.