First autumn mixed exhibition at Arundel's newest gallery

Arundel’s new Tarrant Gallery is offering its first autumn mixed exhibition (running until December 19).

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 offered an opening exhibition during the Arundel Festival this summer, billing the venue as The Tarrant Gallery, home base for The Zimmer Stewart Gallery. Now comes a much longer exhibition taking the gallery through until Christmas.

“This year's exhibition brings together an exciting and thoughtfully curated selection of new paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture by some of the gallery's most popular artists, alongside a number of exciting new artists,” he says.

“With fresh perspectives from our new artists complementing familiar favourites, this year's autumn exhibition promises to be one of our strongest and most diverse exhibitions yet.

“It will be a varied and changing exhibition. As things sell, we will replace them on the wall. So if you return a week or two later, the exhibition may look quite different!”

Among the artists is Christopher Baker, predominantly a landscape painter who relishes braving the elements to confront nature at its most extreme. A trip to Antarctica resulted in an acclaimed series of paintings exhibited in Petworth House and the Royal Academy in 2006.

Also exhibiting are Matt Bodimeade – semi-abstract landscape paintings; Tom Farthing – figurative paintings; Tom Hammick – woodcut and monoprint; Deborah Richards – semi-abstract monotypes; Phil Tyler – figurative painter; Giles Penny – sculptor, painter, printmaker; Ghaz Ahmad – functional ceramics; and Deborah Harwood – decorative ceramics.

“It's good to be back,” says James. “A lot of people came in remembering the old gallery and were pleased to see me back in Tarrant Street. And in the summer we made some sales. It was all good.”

Confirmation that the gallery works well: “The location is good and the size of the gallery is also good. It's a little bit bigger than the gallery space I had before, and rather than having straight walls there are areas where there are like buttresses coming out. There are no straight walls which is great because it means that you can hang in a different way. With a long wall, the display can be a little bit problematic but this makes the hang a lot easier. Also it's light and bright in here. We've got a big window at the front and a big window at the side. There's an enormous amount of natural light that comes in.”

As for the artists: “Some are familiar names. I wanted some of my favourite artists to kick off. The festival exhibition was just to get started. I see this as my first real exhibition so it's good to have some of my favourites and also some new people taking part.”