Engage, enquire and educate with our online programme of exhibitions and events. Join our Online Membership today.
8 January – 7 February 2021
Born in Faedis near Trieste, the son of an architect and winemaker, Francesco Poiana attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and then the celebrated Albicocca fine art printing workshop in Udine before studying for a Masters degree at St Martin’s College of Art in London.
12 January – 12 February 2021
Born in Gawler, South Australia (1978), Christian Thompson is a photographer who is often the subject of his own work and is highly engaged with navigating colonial dynamics. As someone with indigenous Australian heritage Thompson avoids the term ‘aboriginal artist – a mechanism often used for further marginalisation – while grappling with the tensions and undercurrents of his country’s nationhood.
January – February 2021
Active Environmentalism is our take on how to better understand the right thing to do. We can’t value what we don’t know and by becoming better informed we can more readily make the right decisions individually.
Join us for a programme of connected discussions where we learn about the environment to help shape the way we chose to live our lives and, as Christian Thompson says, “think like Future Ancestors.”
15 January – 28 February 2021
An exhibition of paintings by Kurt Jackson, one of Britain’s leading environmental landscape artists and campaigners, documents the spring of 2020 and the arcadia he found bursting into life immediately outside his front door in a remote part of west Cornwall during the challenging period of national lockdown.
The exhibition focuses on paintings of trees that he and his wife, Caroline, planted twenty years ago and that have, over time, formed hollow ‘greenways’ or paths in the interstices between the lines of planting, along which he walked every day from his house to his studio.
In 2021 the programme at Messums has sought out artists that fuse together skill, traditional technique, and contemporary concepts. Elliot Walker will be debuting in Messums London with his first solo show in this very vein. Born in Wolverhampton, the son of a cobbler, Walker was familiar with glass from a very young age having grown up surrounded by crystal glass companies.
17 February – 13 March 2021
Messums is delighted to represent the important contemporary painter John Beard, whose work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in the collections of major gallery museums and institutions, and to welcome to the gallery for his first UK since 2013.
John Beard is a painter of the late 20th century whose subject is as much the process of painting as it is the artworks he makes and his practice, which has spanned over forty years, explores important propositions about the role of painting in the 21st century.
March – April
Making: Its significance, process and meaning
Online talks throughout March and April
The second in our series of online talks focusses on the handmade and the makers at the forefront. The series will be running alongside our annual ceramics exhibition.
Each talk is approximately 30-40 minutes long followed by discussions and we welcome your questions in advance to help build the conversation.