An hour and a half on the train from London St. Pancras and you can reach the seaside town of Margate on the Kent coast, a location that has found favour with arty Londoners relocating for lower house prices and a life by the sea. Margate is the hometown of Dame Tracey Emin, national treasure and now heroine of her birthplace after she made it her mission to regenerate the area through art and culture and opened an art school and artist studios in a former Fisherman’s morgue.
Thanks to the efforts of Emin and her contemporaries Robert Diament and Carl Freedman and the brilliant exhibition programme at Turner Contemporary, it’s possible to find world-class artists past and present both exhibiting and studying in Margate.
I visited Margate during a summer weekend coinciding with the town’s annual Pride celebrations and picked out some highlights for art lovers; ‘T.E.A.R.S The Final Show’ at Tracey Emin Artist Residency, ‘Vanessa Raw’ at Carl Freedman Gallery, ‘Ed Clark’ solo exhibition and ‘Lynda Benglis: Recent Sculptures’ at Turner Contemporary, and Margot in Margate.
Tracey Emin Artist Residency
Tracey Emin’s eponymous Foundation provides professional studio spaces and exhibition opportunities for contemporary artists from Margate and further afield. TKE Studios and TEARS (Tracey Emin Artist Residency) are housed within The Old Margate Bath House and seamen’s morgue, which was purchased and renovated by Emin following a conversation with Carl Freedman and Robert Diament in November 2021. The trio were discussing the empty Bath House, and Carl and Rob suggested Emin turned it into an art school. Emin didn’t waste any time in securing the property, purchasing it the following week, and TEARS was born. It took a year to renovate the building and sift through applications from artists in Margate and worldwide to study at TEAR, and the Artist Residency was launched along with TKE Studios, a professional studio environment where artists can create and develop their work.
The TEARS programme is designed to support painters in developing their craft during an 18-month residency. ‘T.E.A.R.S The Final Show’ features the fruits of labour of the class of 2024; Bianca Raffaella, Darcy Brenna, Emmie Nume, Grace Alexandria, Helen Teede, Anna Pakosz, Jorge K Cruz and Lola Stong-Brett. There is a noticeable dominance of women in the 2024 lineup, and cultural diversity is evident with the artists originating from as far afield as Ecuador, Hungary, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Highlights of ‘T.E.A.R.S The Final Show’ include Bianca Raffaella’s delicate floral paintings with ghostly faces emerging from the shadows. Raffaella is visually impaired and she paints using touch and memory. Helen Teede’s haunting watercolour paintings use an inky red and black palette to explore her experience of pregnancy, her investigation of motherhood and taboos associated with women’s bodies echoing the work of Louise Bourgeois. Lola Stong-Brett offers a contemporary take on abstract figuration, and endless symbols and motifs can be discovered within her canvases.
Applications for the next TEARS residency, starting in April 2025, are open until September 1st, 2024, and TEARS encourages all artists including those from underrepresented groups, to apply and take advantage of the opportunity to work in a professional studio environment at TKE Studios
Emin’s friend Carl Freedman opened his Margate gallery in 2019 after running a gallery in London’s East End for over 15 years. The 10,000 sq ft space occupying the former Thanet Press building is walking distance from Emin’s art school and presents a diverse exhibition programme of curated shows. Contemporary artists including Billy Childish, Tracey Emin and Lindsey Mendick have all had solo shows at the gallery, and various high-profile curators have been invited to curate exhibitions, including Gemma Rolls-Bentley, who curated the LGBGI+ exhibition at London Art Fair earlier this year and the Soho House Brighton art collection.
There is a feeling of diversity and inclusivity in Carl Freedman’s exhibition programme, and also in the T.E.A.R. policy of accepting applications from artists of all ages from all over the world, which seems fitting for a town that celebrates PRIDE and welcomes a broad spectrum of people with open arms.
Carl Freedman Gallery
Vanessa Raw’s solo exhibition ‘On Earth We Weren’t Meant to Stay’at Carl Freedman is a sumptuous celebration of sapphic desire, and a welcome reinterpretation of the male gaze that puts women in the frame from a woman’s perspective. Echoes of Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ are combined with expressionist animal motifs evoking Der Blaue Reiter, and given a contemporary twist by Raw.
Vanessa Raw (B.1984) is a T.E.A.R. alumnus, who studied Fine Art at Loughborough University and was selected for a space at TKE Studios in 2022. Her evocative canvases depict a bucolic world inhabited by Nymph-like, sexually liberated women. The choice of artist seems fitting for Margate, which has a strong LGBTQI+ community and was animated by the joyous celebrations of Margate Pride when I visited.
Art critic Emily Steer says of Raw:
Vanessa Raw paints abundant natural scenes that centre female pleasure and kinship. On Earth We Weren’t Meant to Stay depicts groups of nude women exploring one another’s bodies, lounging, licking and cuddling. There are moments of both heated passion and tender devotion, as her women, cocooned within the safe solitude of luscious fields and forests, intimately connect. The British artist’s paintings are immersive in scale and colour, inviting the viewer into vast paradisal compositions formed from fluid marks of vibrant green, blue and lilac. Her settings create a sense of containment for the women within them, with branches, leaves and brushstrokes producing a rounded canopy in which they seem to have privacy from the outside world.
Turner Contemporary
Back in 2011, before Carl Freedman Gallery opened its doors in Margate and Tracey Emin launched her art school, Turner Contemporary was founded on the site of an old boarding house on the harbour where JMW Turner once stayed during his visits to the coastal town to paint the skies and capture the light. Name for and inspired by the life and work of the celebrated Romantic 19th Century painter, Turner Contemporary presents a world-class exhibition programme in a David Chipperfield-designed building and offers free entry and activities to encourage engagement from the local community.
Three new polished bronze sculptures by Lynda Benglis are currently on display in the Sunley Gallery, their shell-like forms chiming perfectly with the waves visible through the glass windows. If you look carefully, you can spy a half-submerged Anthony Gormely statue in the sea beyond the gallery. Meanwhile in the first floor galleries, Turner Contemporary is presenting the first institutional exhibition in the UK of pioneering American artist Ed Clark.
Born in 1941 in Louisiana, Lynda Benglis challenged the status quo of painting and sculpture and transcended the boundaries of a predominantly male-dominated art world. The trio of sculptures on display at Turner Contemporary were born from her deep investigation into knotted forms, evolving from clay models to digitally transformed bronze counterparts, allowing the works to retain the intimate touch of the artist’s hand. The reflective surfaces evoke the fluidity of liquid forms, interacting with both light and space. The sculptures cement Benglis’ reputation as one of the most influential artists working today.
Lynda Benglis:
Everything is a knot, you know, like a growing plant is a knot, a body is a knot, every embryo is a knot. And I began to think, what is form? It’s a growth. It’s a continuation. It’s an expansion. It’s a butterfly. It’s a cocoon. It expands and it flies away. It flies out, you know, but it also contains energy.
Ed Clark (1926-2019) was born in New Orleans and raised in Chicago, attending the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago from 1947 to 1951. In 1952, he furthered his studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he would return to make work for the rest of his life.
A retrospective of his paintings and works on paper from the 1940s to 2000s is on display at Turner Contemporary, including loans from The Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, many of which have not been seen outside the USA. Clark was late to receive international acclaim, but his contributions to contemporary art, such as his innovative push broom technique and shaped canvases mean that he is now recognised as a groundbreaking figure within the New York School of Abstraction. In 1956, he adopted the use of a 48-inch push broom to allow him to drive paint across the canvas with great force, a technique known as ‘the big sweep’ and exemplified in works such as Locomotion 1963.
Clark’s palette of blues and yellows, combined with his sweeping horizontal lines of paint across the canvas, fit perfectly in the Turner Contemporary galleries adjacent to the expanse of the North Sea. Clark’s canvases registered his “sensitivity to the pigmentation of the earth and the colour of the skies”.
Margo in Margate
A little gem of a gallery not to be missed is Margo in Margate, an independent space founded in February 2014 by Irish artist Margo Mc Daid, AKA Margo in Margate.
Dedicated to her art, Margo has committed to painting daily in her Kent studio, producing an impressive collection of artworks, with each piece reflecting a day in her artistic journey. She has created a unique signature style of female portraiture which has earned her a cult status and big following. She draws inspiration from Margate’s youth culture, using a pop art style, defined outlines and bold colours that draw you into the gallery from the street. Margo studied applied art at Camberwell College of Arts and discovered the New York Pop Art scene during a period working as a waitress in Manhattan. She relocated the England and settled on the Kent coast in 2010. Margo’s gallery is full of colourful portraits on canvas and paper, as well as ceramics.
Margo in Margate:
I literally live to paint – every single day of my life starts the same way, as paintbrush in hand, I create work all day long. It is my joy and my passion, and every single inch of my studio is completely covered with works on paper and canvas.
‘T.E.A.R.S The Final Show’ at TKE Studios is open Saturdays and Sundays from 12pm-5pm until 1stSeptember, 2024. traceyeminfoundation.com
Vanessa Raw ‘On Earth We Weren’t Meant to Stay’ is at Carl Freedman gallery until 7th September, 2024: carlfreedman.com/exhibitions/2024/vanessa-raw
Lynda Benglis: Recent Sculptures is at Turner Contemporary until 15th September, 2024.
Ed Clark is at Turner Contemporary until 1st September, 2024. turnercontemporary.org
Margo in Margate margoinmargate.com
