Sophie Barber and Michael Landy at Hastings Contemporary

Friday saw the launch of three new major exhibitions at Hastigs Contemporary Gallery at Rock-a-Nore.

Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry, is a solo

exhibition by British artist Sophie Barber (b.1996) in the town where she lives and works.

With intimate three-dimensional ‘cushion’ canvas paintings and large-scale works, Barber’s approach mixes humour and popular culture with folklore and the surreal, playing with the possibilities of scale, reference and materiality.

The exhibition will feature brand new works, alongside recent critically acclaimed work. Rooted in the landscape around her, Barber’s works are less depictions of her native Sussex coast than distillations of the impression it leaves. Her visual world is filled with echoes of her environment: bird shelters, tents, beaches, and the region’s ever-shifting skies. A childhood birdwatcher and carer for birds, avian life plays a central role in her imagery, connecting personal memory with environmental and cultural narratives.

In the new work made for this exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, Barber also returns to her long-held interest in the stories and structures of art history, and how this relates to her deep connection to the Sussex coastline. By referencing artists she admires, including Claes Oldenburg, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney and Vincent van Gogh, Barber opens a dialogue between her own practice and theirs. Sunflowers, a subject with a significant place in the history of painting, are a recurring motif in Barber’s new work in the exhibition. Alongside Van Gogh’s bold, emotional blooms, O’Keeffe’s studied, sculptural forms, and Hockney’s later, more reflective still lifes, Barber’s paintings explore the beauty and mortality that sunflowers have come to symbolise, adding her own take, shaped by the light and

colour of Sussex.

‘It’s about singing from the same song sheet, but mine are a bit out of tune. I like the saying painting from life, isn’t it all painting from life, whether I’m painting someone else’s flowers they’ve painted from life or someone’s sculpture that already exists in the world, it still found me somehow and ended up in my life, otherwise I wouldn’t bother painting it.’

This exhibition marks the first in Barber’s hometown of Hastings.

Michael Landy, for whom drawing has always been a crucial part of his work, is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented draughtsmen of his generation. Known more for his large installations and participatory works, such as Semi-detached (2004) the reconstruction of his Essex childhood home at Tate Britain, or his kinetic Saints Alive sculptures (2013) shown at the National Gallery, in this exhibition he reveals a quieter and more intimate consideration of the world around him.

In LOOK, Landy presents a group of intensely personal drawings from 2004-2005 relating to his own experience of testicular cancer and his father’s tunnelling accident. The fragmented minutiae of life, and the human body, float in isolation on the white page, disconnected yet lovingly rendered with a delicacy and poignancy that the object or subject would not normally command. Through his intense observation and focus, Landy has created a body of work that represents the bond between father and son, reflecting on memory, vulnerability and the past.

hese works will be accompanied by a new self-portrait made specifically for Hastings Contemporary.The exhibition will also include Landy’s second series of Nourishment etchings from 2024 that sit, maybe ironically, within the Botanical Drawing tradition. Elevating the humble weed to a majestic scale with precision and elegance, the 2024 Nourishments emerged from a residency in Naples. Landy collected a number of these plants and took them back to his residence in Naples, where he potted and tended them, making studies of their structures including detailed renderings of roots, leaves and flowers.

Here we see Landy once again revelling in and scrutinising the resilience and complex structures of these disregarded elements that surround us in our urban environments. Of these plants Landy said ‘they are marvellous, optimistic things that you find ... they occupy an urban landscape which is very hostile and they have to be adaptable and find little bits of soil to prosper.

This exhibition considers Landy’s continued engagement with marginalisation, our ideas of value, and his interest in the overlooked or disregarded. Finding beauty in the ordinary, giving new meaning and dignity to that which is passed over by most, he elevates the everyday while bringing our attention to simple complexity.

‘As a child, if you put anything in front of me, I would try to render it to the best of my ability. Not much has changed in the proceeding 50 years.’

Both exhibitions run until 15th March 2026

Visit Hastings Contemporary for more details