Exhibition of the week Towards Night
Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (01323-434670, www.townereastbourne.org.uk). Until 22 January
The night is a subject that has “continually fascinated artists”, said Aesthetica Magazine. As this major new show at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery amply demonstrates, the world without the familiar light of day “becomes an alien place”, a time of “dreams and nightmares, insomnia and fantasy, hauntings and enchantments”. Towards Night brings together works by 60 artists, from Constable to Chagall to Howard Hodgkin, and sets out to explore the feelings of “wonderment” and “dystopia” the night has inspired over the centuries. The exhibition is ordered to trace the changing colours of the sky from dusk to dawn, and as it progresses, the “sense of uncertainty escalates”. The works here are united by a common “fascination” with the hours of darkness: seen together, they reveal a “plethora of emotional responses” to the “transformative” qualities of the night.
The “magic” of the exhibition lies “not in single paintings, but the whole journey”, said Alistair Hicks in Apollo magazine. The first room presents a “metaphorical twilight”, pairing Chagall’s The Poet Reclining with a work by Julian Opie and a set of 18th century Indian miniatures. From here on in, the palette darkens: in the works of artists as various as William Blake, Prunella Clough and Louise Bourgeois, a “dream-like desire and sense of curiosity recurs again and again”. Credit for this coherence must go to curator Tom Hammick, whose own paintings feature in the exhibition. Hammick is no stranger to the hours of darkness – he works through the night in his studio – and the show is in a sense a “personal nocturnal journey”, showing us how Hammick adapts and is challenged by the work of the artists he “most admires”.
It’s “no coincidence” that the best nocturnal paintings are by artists from northern latitudes, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Mediterranean art tends to be filled with “glorious daylight”, whereas painters from northern Europe choose to “reveal the wonder of darkness”. The works in this exhibition by artists such as Edvard Munch, J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich offer confirmation for the view that “night and its strangeness are the north’s great gift to art”. Or consider the painting Echo Lake – a solitary policeman standing on the “luminous” shore of a dark lake – by the Scottishborn painter Peter Doig, a work that depicts darkness as a “realm of possibility and danger, folklore, fear and desire”. At a time of year when nights are drawing in and the evenings are becoming “duskier, mistier, cooler”, this is the show you need to see.