EASTBOURNE.- Towner Eastbourne announced a programme celebrating its centenary year; TOWNER 100. A series of major exhibitions take audiences on a journey through the Towner Collection past and present, as well as offer the chance to witness the world’s leading prize for contemporary art in Sussex for the first time, and to experience a large-scale presentation of one of the UK’s best loved sculptors.

The exhibition programme is as follows, with events, wrap-around engagement projects across the town, and a range of screenings, installations, public commissions, talks and intergenerational cultural moments, to be announced in 2023. The programme will be a moment to celebrate the past 100 years of Towner but also look at the next 100; what a museum and gallery can be, and who it is for.

Towner’s Collection will also launch online in 2023, with the first works to be showcased a series of new acquisitions, including a focus on works by female artists in the Collection.

TOWNER 100: The Living Collection
Until 28 August 2023 Free Admission Gallery 1

Towner’s Collection comprises over 5000 artworks that individually and collectively reflect and reveal the history of Towner as a public art gallery in Eastbourne since 1923. Sited in Sussex, Towner’s Collection features many landscapes and seascapes that draw inspiration from this unique location. From 1923 the collection was housed inside Towner’s first home, an 18th century manor house, which shaped the collection for almost 90 years. In 2009 Towner moved into a purpose-built modernist style gallery where we celebrate its centenary. The Living Collection will considers Towner’s broad and varied history of collecting and exhibiting over the past one hundred years through a selection of paintings, prints and artifacts. This celebratory display offers Towner and its communities the occasion to look back to appreciate the past and the opportunity to look forward, engaging with the present as we envision its future. Expect to see artists such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Wadsworth, Vanessa Bell, Gertrude Hermes, William Gear and Greta Dellean.

TOWNER 100: Unseen
11 February to 14 May 2023 Free Admission
Gallery 2 and 3




100 years on from when the Towner Collection began, there is a moment to reflect on what an art collection is, who it is for, and what it says about a town, a community or a time period. Taking inspiration from Towner’s Eastbourne unique coastal location where the channel meets the South Downs, the exhibition draws on these themes and include painting, moving images, prints, illustration, sculpture, installation and photography. It brings together key works from the collection, many of which are previously unseen, having not yet been displayed since their acquisition. Artists featured include Elizabeth Price, Helen Cammock, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Tom Hammick, Michael Rakowitz, Roland Jarvis, Rachel Jones, David Nash and Clare Woods.

Barbara Hepworth, Art and Life (ticketed) 27 May to 3 September 2023
Gallery 2 and 3

This exhibition, which has garnered rave reviews across the country after visits to Wakefield, Edinburgh and St Ives, will display some of Hepworth’s most celebrated sculptures including the modern abstract carving that launched her career in the 1920s and 1930s, her iconic strung sculptures of the 1940s and 1950s, and large-scale bronze and carved sculptures from later in her career. Key loans from national public collections will be shown alongside works from private collections that have not been on public display since the 1970s, and rarely seen drawings, paintings and fabric designs. The exhibition will be themed around Hepworth's broader cultural interests in music, dance, theatre, politics and literature, exploring these and encouraging new interpretations and presentations of her work.

Lothar Götz
Dance Diagonal
Towner Eastbourne exterior

German artist Lothar Götz has transformed the exterior walls of the gallery with his new large-scale, colourful geometric artwork, Dance Diagonal (2019). Götz, who is based in the UK, was chosen from 60 artists and designers from an open call for the Brewers Towner Commission to create an artwork to mark the 10th anniversary of the gallery’s move from its original home in Eastbourne’s Old Town. Drawing on its unique architecture, angles and exterior recesses and alcoves, Götz’s mural – his largest to date – envelops the length and width of three sides of the award-winning building. Götz’s work – typically large-scale paintings, drawings and installations that respond to existing architectural structures – has included commissions for South Bank Centre, London (2014) and Leeds Art Gallery (2017). Dance Diagonal is his first major commission on the south coast and the first time an artist has been commissioned to create an artwork for Towner’s exterior.

Leap Then Look 
Play Interact Explore 
7 February to 5 March 2023  Free admission 
Studio 2 

Play Interact Explore is an exhibition of interactive artworks and resources developed in collaboration with community groups in Eastbourne and Brighton. A lively, exciting and curiosity-filled space designed to support and encourage visitors of all types to take part in playful exploration and critical thought through making.  

 Leap Then Look create artworks, participatory projects and events which explore the possibilities of play, collaboration and material exploration in cross-disciplinary art practice.  Four community groups - West Rise Junior School, Arts in Mind, Downs View Special School and the Brighton and Hove Foster Service - will work directly with LTL through a series of interactive workshops used to design and test artworks in a collaborative process leading to the creation of the exhibition. The exhibition will be activated by a public programme of workshops and by four associate artists who will use the space to create their own work and encourage others to join them.    This exhibition and wider project is part of a development in participatory arts practice which sees the engagement of communities groups in innovative, multidisciplinary collaborative practice as central to the creation of new approaches to art and exhibition making.   Further Learning and Engagement projects will be announced for Towner 100 soon.