Hastings Contemporary: Environment, Observation, Protest
VICTORIA KINGHAM
The new three-artist exhibition at Hastings Contemporary has much to recommend it, both in imaginative curation and artistic excellence. The large room occupied by local artist Sophie Barber’s paintings sets out her homage to the artists who have inspired her, and at the same time to her home environment, which she has never left. Claes Oldenburg’s eleven-foot synthetic green ice-cream sculpture is incongruous enough in any gallery. Here, reworked on a vast floor-to-ceiling painting which Barber produced in three tall panels, adding the caption ‘Claes ice cream melts at Pett’, it is a little overwhelming. It’s funny, but at the same time reverential. That’s true of her other paintings: of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and Hockney’s sunflowers which, in turn, acknowledge the genius of Van Gogh. So in this gallery’s unique plain setting, we look through Barber’s eyes at four generations of artistic inspiration.
Michael Landy, Common Daisy,2024: etching on paper. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery
In the room next door is a satisfying contrast. Michael Landy, RA, has produced the most delicate, perfect drawings of plants. They match in detail and accomplishment the most excellent botanical drawings (I suppose I’m thinking of Marianne North here), but they also include the root structure. If he didn’t manage to finish these intricate drawings in one day, then to keep the flower from wilting, the roots would have to be preserved overnight in either soil or water. The other important thing is that these small framed perfections are of flowers that we usually think of as weeds – common daisies, vervain, sweet Alison. There are other, more unexpected, drawings too – if you’re going, I won’t spoil the surprises, but they’re all excellent.
Isobel Rock’s work takes up the upper floor, and I will be lucky enough to be able to talk to her about it next week, so more will appear in our next issue. Enough to say here that it is the most intricate work, of a breadth and detail worthy of a Grayson Perry or any other artist who has the gift of a childlike eye for detail without any kind of polite filter. Rock spent time in prison for environmental activism, and one of the exhibits is a reproduction of the cell in which she produced some of this work. The only other cell I’ve seen reproduced as an art work is that of Ai Wei Wei, also a political prisoner. Rock’s cell, though stark, is a little more benign and doesn’t have the prison guards watching over her while she eats, just packets of sweets on a shelf.
But her work is remarkable: funny, often absurd, detailed to an extreme degree. There’s a bird’s eye depiction of a lunchtime in her cell block, but with naked prisoners sitting round a table or falling from the balcony. There’s a room full of slugs enjoying themselves (after the end of the planet as we know it) at ‘SliggyWiggys Emporium’, which looks a little like Brighton Pavillion. Under the sea, alligators colonise a pagoda while a cruise ship sails fruitlessly over the top; slugs guard the gates of paradise while poor, thin, naked human beings queue up outside. It’s fantasy, but at the same time apocalyptic: there are echoes of old Dutch masters in some of the compositions, of earlier medieval paintings of Hell, in the despair.
Hastings Contemporary shows Sophie Barber, Michael Landy and Isabel Rock until 15 March 2026. Details and times at hastingscontemporary.org/event-category/exhibitions
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