Watch art conservation as it happens at Towner Eastbourne

Spokeswoman Imogen Harris said: “This vast, striking wax and oil abstract painting belongs to the University of Sussex and was gifted by the artist soon after the University’s construction in 1962.

“The work is taking place in the ground floor studio space at the gallery, and there will be a ticketed event on March 19, available to the public, where the conservator will talk about her work. This will include behind the scenes access to the materials and techniques used in conserving this painting, as well as the chance to be the first to see this significant work.

(Wednesday March 19, 2pm to 3pm, Studio 1, £10/ £7 concessions).

“A highly skilled paintings conservator, Sophie Reddington has worked with many renowned museums across their national and private collections. With many years of experience which also includes TV appearances, she has been expanding her work in Brighton while collaborating with Towner Eastbourne, Charleston Trust and Pallant House Gallery.

“This is the first time the painting will be on view to the public in decades, ahead of taking a starring role in the upcoming Sussex Modernism exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, May 23- September 28.”

Sussex Modernism will explore the many modernisms of Sussex, says spokeswoman Nicola Jeffs: “With significant art collections, galleries, museums, and institutions founded and developed during the last century, modernism is now widely celebrated in Sussex and beyond.

“The new exhibition at Towner Eastbourne will offer new ways of experiencing both modernism and the region and reveals that there are many modernisms, many Sussexes, and many ways of harnessing the landscapes, cultures and histories of a place to reimagine how art should be made and life lived.

“The exhibition is an ongoing provocation to explore the relationship between art, place, and politics over a period of more than one hundred years. Interweaving painting, sculpture, film, textiles, literature and music, this extensive exhibition will reveal that there is much more to be learned from the ways in which artists of different kinds drew on the capacities of their locations to promote psychic and social change.

“With a long chronological span, from the late 19th century to the present, Sussex Modernism is a show of jostling perspectives and surprising juxtapositions. It includes artists associated with different modernist movements, those who opposed them, and those who came before and after modernism’s early twentieth-century heyday. Offering an alternative story of modernism, it features an array of countercultural artists from the 1960s to 1980s who flouted established tastes in their attempts to embrace the new and now.”

“Where exhibitions about Sussex tend to highlight rural landscapes, this one also includes works by artists from urban locations, for instance, surreal collages and drawings created in Hove in the 1980s by Holocaust survivor Arnold Daghani. John Upton’s hallucinatory crowd-scene featuring Jimi Hendrix and film-maker Jeff Keen, whose work is also in the show, is compared with a 1970s painting collectively made by the Art Workers Co-operative for a convalescence centre in Eastbourne. While the exhibition compares many, competing ideas about where creativity happens, it also draws attention to moments where common ground was found.”