Exhibitions programme 2025

Spring

February 22–May 26, 2025
Jaki Irvine: Ssh Ow
Ssh Ow is the first major solo exhibition in a UK public gallery in a decade by Dublin-based artist Jaki Irvine (b. 1966, Ireland) and features Ack Ro’, an immersive thirteen-channel video installation that surrounds viewers with an evocative interplay of sound, imagery, and light. The piece layers delicate sound and visuals, to create an atmosphere that feels both disorienting and intimate. Fragments of film are interspersed with 28 looping pink neons, which spell out anagrams derived from the words of Cracklin’ Rosie, the title of a Neil Diamond song from 1970.

Irvine’s project at DLWP includes a newly-commissioned immersive live work titled SHWO EM TEH WAY OT GO HMOE that will be presented in our auditorium in May 2025.

February 22–June 1, 2025
Michelle Roberts: Red, Blue, Up
Michelle Roberts is a Bexhill-based artist whose paintings and drawings are ambitious in scale, conception and realisation. Her subjects arise from the realm of lived experience, such as a holiday, or the thrill of an Air Show, whilst other works celebrate events such as the Diamond Jubilee, or films that she has seen. Roberts’ meticulous drawing style intricately dissects shapes and forms, creating patterns with unwavering precision and control, with compositions that come to life through vivid colour.

Roberts’ solo exhibition is programmed in collaboration with Outside In, following the artist winning first prize at its national open exhibition, Humanity, in 2023, and Project Art Works, a neurodiverse collection of artists and activists based in Hastings, of which Roberts is a member.

Summer

June 14–September 14, 2025
Allan Weber: My Order
Allan Weber (b. 1992, Brazil) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Rio de Janeiro. Working across a range of mediums including assemblage, installation, sculpture and photography, his practice acts as a vehicle to deconstruct the realities of daily life within the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. 

Weber’s work incorporates material and visual elements he views as synonymous with life in the favelas. This includes tarps used at funk parties, common architectural features such as water tanks, razor blades used to create popular hairstyles, as well as elements that relate to the work life of those active in phone app bicycle and motorcycle food delivery. Questioning the traditions and legacy of Brazilian Constructivism, he appropriates these elements into compositions that transform their social meaning.

Weber's first institutional exhibition in the UK is a co-commission with Nottingham Contemporary, where the first iteration will open in February 2025, and has been co-curated by Pablo León de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation.

Claudia Alarcón & Silät
Claudia Alarcón (b. 1989, Argentina) is an indigenous textile artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people of northern Salta, Argentina. Alongside her individual practice, she leads the Silät collective, an organisation of one hundred women weavers of different generations from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wichí communities. Wichí society is clan-based and matrilocal. Weaving with hand-spun vegetal fibres from the local chaguar plant has been a communal, female-led activity for centuries, and is fundamental to the visual culture, narrative history and economics of the Wichí people. 

This exhibition will be Claudia Alarcón & Silät's first institutional solo presentation in Europe and follows their participation in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024.

Autumn

October 4, 2025–January 4, 2026
Betty Parsons
Betty Parsons (b. 1900, d. 1982, USA) is best-known as a visionary New York gallerist who significantly shaped twentieth-century art in the US through her roster of artists including Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Alongside her gallery career, Parsons maintained a rigorous artistic practice of painting and sculpture, working at weekends in her Long Island studio.

Parsons developed a bold, playful, and expressive style, with influences ranging from natural phenomena and the cosmos to spirituality. Extensive travel across Europe, Africa, Japan, and Mexico deeply enriched her relationship with colour and form, while the coastal landscape of Long Island, New York inspired her pursuit of capturing fleeting energy in her surroundings, which she described as the ‘sheer energy’ or ‘invisible presence’ of a situation. In the 1970s, Parsons began sculpting, using driftwood from the beaches near her studio to create small, memento-like constructions. This coastal setting also inspired her poetry, which filled her sketchbooks alongside watercolours of the landscape.

This will be the first survey of Parsons’ work in Europe, charting the trajectory of her artistic practice through painting, sculpture and poetry.