Inside new Arundel art gallery

The Tarrant Gallery has opened in Arundel as a new venue for art exhibitions in the town.

From 2003-2020, James Stewart ran the Zimmer Stewart Gallery just a hundred yards away. Now, after six years of staging pop-up exhibitions in various places, James has returned to the idea of having a permanent gallery.

He is billing it as The Tarrant Gallery, home base for The Zimmer Stewart Gallery – and he is excited at the prospect.

“I just missed having a gallery!” he explains.

“The Zimmer Stewart Gallery started in May 2003. I can lean out the window and see it now less than 100 yards away. It used to be at 29 Tarrant Street. I am now at 6 Tarrant Street (BN18 9DG), on the other side of the road, closer to the High Street.

“I stopped the gallery in October 2020 and we moved out on November 2. At that time I was just finishing doing a lot of things for the council. We lived upstairs and I just had had 17 years of exhibiting, doing eight to ten exhibitions a year, and I just felt it was getting too much.

“I moved to Warningcamp a mile and a half from Arundel and in the years in between I have done pop-up exhibitions in various places but I've always wanted to carry on exhibiting. In late 2025 this building came up in Arundel and it has been a bit of a project because the basement needs a lot of work but actually the shop space is very good. There used to be an estate agent here but for the last ten to 20 years it was a shop. The last incarnation was as a dress shop. It has always been a retail establishment and it's a really nice, light space.

“I'm calling it The Tarrant Gallery rather than The Zimmer Stewart Gallery for a number of reasons. It is to show that it is a different incarnation of what I had before but I also want to make sure that I give myself a good balance of life and to be able to rent it out from time to time to other people. But I want to rent it out while maintaining a certain level and quality of work. I don't want the quality of the works to decrease just because I have run off to be on a beach somewhere! I want the gallery to be showing interesting work and work that will challenge.

“I will do maybe six to eight exhibitions a year lasting a month each time and then in an ideal world there would be three other exhibitions which will be rental exhibitions. I'm very excited about the whole thing. It will introduce me to new people and to new artists which will be great.”

The inaugural exhibition is Plenty, an exhibition of paintings by Nick Bodimeade with sculptures by Christopher Marvell.

“This runs to the end of the Arundel Festival and Gallery Trail on August 31 when we will close for some essential works and then reopen hopefully in October.”