'Edgelands : Exploring the Margins of Urban Living' coming to Beverley Art Gallery

A new free exhibition is coming to Beverley Art Gallery on Saturday 2 September : ‘Edgelands : Exploring the Margins of Urban Living’ will run until Saturday 14 October.

‘Edgelands’ was a name dreamt up some 20 years ago to describe aspects of the changing face of Britain.

The paintings in this exhibition are by artists from the recently formed Contemporary British Painting group.  In the work of Day Bowman, Dan Coombs,  Marguerite Horner,  Barbra Howey, Lee Maelzer and Sean Williams, visitors will encounter six visions of the modern world – they are works that provide both celebration and social comment on the discarded margins of modern living.

These paintings explore and document wastelands and neglected fringelands, the forgotten and overlooked.  These landscapes are founded in personal journeys of memory and loss, of childhood days spent exploring the architecture of discarded industry and where abandoned cars and buildings and rusting machinery find their grave. 

In his catalogue essay for the Edgelands exhibition Andrew Lambirth writes: ‘Artists open up the world, enlarge the boundaries of what is worth considering visually, or what is paintable.  What Edward Hopper did for the seediness and abandonment of the city and its suburbs, these artists are doing for the land beyond the ‘burbs.  Edgelands offer fresh experiences, fresh material for the artist to mediate and bring to our attention’.

Here are six artists and six visions of the modern worlds we inhabit; works  that provide both celebration and social comment on the discarded and margins of urban living.

The free exhibition will be in Beverley Art Gallery, situated in the Treasure House, which is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9.30am – 5pm; Tuesday and Thursday 9.30 am – 8pm; and Saturday 9am – 4pm.

Find full details of all exhibitions at www.museums.eastriding.gov.uk