Phyllida Barlow + Michael Armitage

Our summer season celebrates the importance of art and creativity, its capacity to empower all of us and make positive change. It brings together works by British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, British-Kenyan painter Michael Armitage and JMW Turner with artwork by young people from Kent and Africa. The gallery will becomes a space for making, discussion and exchange, whilst outside primary school children are transforming neglected sites in the town, as part of our unique Art Inspiring Change programme.

Phyllida Barlow

For 5 decades Phyllida Barlow has been making playful, large-scale sculptures that physically transform gallery spaces, using everyday materials such as plywood, cement, plasterboard. This exhibition brings together works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection alongside other sculptures and a selection of drawings from throughout her career.

Michael Armitage: Peace Coma

A series of new and recent works by Michael Armitage - incidentally a former pupil of Barlow’s at the Slade School of Art - will be shown for the first time in a public gallery in his exhibition Peace Coma. Playing on Western art history’s treatment of places that are seen as ‘other’ and drawing on personal and collective memories of life in Kenya, as well as news and images circulating online, his paintings challenge social attitudes and inequalities.