Durham Art Gallery Exhibitions

Saturday 18 October – Sunday 23 November

Tim Brennan – The Great North

This atmospheric series of photographs by Tim Brennan explores how geography, personal memory and social history intersect. In the tradition of the seascape, the images depict the North Sea, where most of the North’s unmined coal still resides.

The photographs in the exhibition have been created using a low-resolution mobile phone camera which when enlarged beyond clear definition, the images become hazy and impressionistic, suggesting the more abstract works of Turner.

Tim Brennan is viewed as one of the most important artists to contribute to the social and political role of contemporary art particularly around minimalism, performance and land art. He is Programme Leader for MA Curating at the University of Sunderland.

Matt Sewell Home Fires and Deepdales

Matt Sewell is an illustrator and artists originally hails County Durham in is currently based in London. His work draws on his rural heritage, fusing fairytale-like narratives, often-psychedelic landscapes and a symbolic treatment of animals.

Matt's favored media have changed through the years, his natural style finding itself equally at home on people's feet with his own range of Gravis footwear, on animated adverts for 3.

Matt has produced illustrations for The Guardian, 55 DSL, BBC and K-Swiss and hand-painted murals for organizations such as Puma, Selfridges, Magma and Topman in Oxford Street.

Saturday 18 October – Sunday 23 November

Meloni Poole INT: Underground:Day/Nighth

INT: Underground is film work made in response to the closure of Annesley Bentinck Mine in Nottingham in 2000. The film consists of underground footage travelling to the coal face and back, resulting in a piece of work that is like being inside a monster, atmospheric, ghostly and out of this world.

Meloni Poole is a Sheffield based artist who has written and directed several films for Channel 4 and made a series of installation pieces for galleries. Her work often explores the harsh realities of coal-mining.

Saturday 29 November – Sunday 4 January 2009

Unpopular Culture: Grayson Perry selects from the Arts Council Collection

Grayson Perry was catapulted into the public consciousness in 2003 when he won the Turner Prize for his delicate coil pots adorned with drawings and text suggesting a range of subject matter. Perhaps less well-known is Perry’s work as a curator. Unpopular Culture highlights this aspect of Perry’s practice and offers his personal view of the Arts Council Collection: one of the foremost national collections of British post-war art, with over 7,500 works.

The show includes works by; Kenneth Armitage; Frank Auerbach; Ian Berry; Anthony Caro; Lynn Chadwick; Barbara Hepworth; L.S. Lowry; Henry Moore, Paul Nash; Eduardo Paolozzi; Martin Parr; Tony Ray-Jones and Homer Sykes as well as two striking new works by Perry himself.

Unpopular Culture examines a period in history which Perry argues was ‘before British Art became fashionable.’ The exhibition of more than 70 works by 50 artists encompasses a variety of media, figurative painting, bronze sculpture and documentary photography.

Unpopular Culture is accompanied by a catalogue that includes commissioned essays by Grayson Perry and Blake Morrison and a limited edtion silk headscarf designed by Grayson Perry available from the Gallery Shop

A Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from the South Bank Centre, London on behalf of Arts Council England.

Designed and Made

Designed and Made are an artist’s led designer / maker agency whose offices and gallery are located above the Live Theatre, on Newcastle’s Quayside. They provide support for designer / makers with develop the making, exhibiting and collecting of contemporary crafts across the North East.

Its members have received both international and national acclaim and are recognized as the leading North East based designer-makers.

Designed and Made member, Helena Seget, has curated an exhibition of selected works, offering visitors to the Durham Art Gallery an opportunity to view work at the forefront of its field.

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Exhibition Policy

Past Exhibitions