Galleries - June 2012

National Open Art Competition also based in the town and showing annually in the Minerva Gallery, withthe prizewinners going on show subsequently in Pallant House. (A reminder here, by the way, that entries for 2012 are currently being called for, rather earlier than usual.) Moving north-easterly – up the A3 – Surrey is becoming an increasingly self-confident (ie not always looking to London) artistic centre, witness the growing success of the Surrey Open Studios scheme, with 165 venues from Hindhead in the SouthWest to Croydon in the North East open this month. It rather shakes the county’s conventional suburban image – and it’s a great way to explore its hidden beauties too. A museum in the region which has thrown off its slightly fusty image witha vengeance in recent years is the Watts Gallery outside Guildford. They had a huge makeover last year and are now putting on special exhibitions too – their major new June offering on 'Dickens and the Artists' including works by Fildes, Frithand Hicks . And, still on the subject of Victorians, the work of a really late and rather extra-ordinary one, Sir Claude Francis Barry, who developed a highly individual colouristic approach to landscape, can always be seen, 20 miles or so up the road, at Mitchell Studio Gallery in Addleston. NU West Sussex & Surrey To call itself “the home of Modern Art in the South” might seem a grand claim for Pallant House Gallery to make, but with the sequence of impressive shows of 20th C. British Art it has put on over the last year or so – Burra and Vaughan among them – it is by no means hyperbole. It continues unabated in June with a memorial show for that most neglected (and much missed) painter Adrian Berg, whose richly coloured, intensely lyrical paintings will now, we hope, find a new audience. Meanwhile a big 80th Birthday show, ‘Peter Blake and Pop Music,’ follows at the end of the month. Chichester and its environs have become something of an artistic hot spot recently with the Cass Sculpture Foundation just up the road at Goodwood and the prestigious, and valuable, 25. GALLERIES JUNE 12 It rather shakes the county’s conventional suburban image P R A T T C O N T E M P O R A R Y Ana Maria Pacheco at the Ageas Salisbury International Arts Festival 2012 25 May to 13 June Sculpture at Salisbury Cathedral 25 May to 9 June Prints at Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum 1 June at 3pm Ana Maria Pacheco in conversation with Colin Wiggins at the Salisbury Arts Centre W: www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk T: 01732 882326