Liz West - H.A.P.P.Y exhibition
Dates: 13 April until 5 October 2025
Price: free
Acclaimed British artist Liz West brings a mesmerizing exhibition to the Mercer, inviting audiences to experience a dazzling interplay of light, space and reflection.
Through her art, Liz West creates playful experiences and environments that heighten our senses and positively affect how we feel. She is interested in our deep human connection to colour and light, and how they can evoke physical, psychological and emotional responses in us.
The title of this exhibition reflects Liz’s experience of Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.), a condition linked to the shorter and darker days of autumn and winter. She experiments with colour and light to create environments that inspire joy and curiosity.
At the heart of this exhibition is Our Colour Reflection, an immersive installation made of hundreds of vibrantly coloured reflective discs arranged across the floor of our 1806 Promenade Room, transforming this important space from Harrogate’s spa history into a dazzling interplay of light, space, and reflection.
For the first time in many years, the windows in this space are revealed to allow natural light to flood in, creating an ever-changing kaleidoscope of reflections. Every experience of the installation is different depending on light levels, weather, clouds and the path of the sun. As we move through the space, our perspectives shift, revealing new combinations of colour and light in an absorbing sensory experience.
In a unique collaboration, West’s work has inspired the Leeds-based electronic producer, musician and artist Cherry Seraph (the alias of Sophie Russell) to create a new sound piece which will play continuously in the gallery. Both artists explore how frequencies of sound and light can impact our emotional well-being.
In addition, the exhibition brings together for the first time West’s works on paper to showcase a collection of three-dimensional ‘concertina’ pieces and experimental drawings that reveal her instinctive and intellectual engagement with the emotive qualities of colour. The artist has also selected artworks and artefacts from Harrogate’ museum collections to reflect upon our responses to colour and light.
Look, Look Again exhibition
Dates: 22 January to 4 April 2025
Price: free
The Mercer Gallery has teamed up with the Craven Museum in Skipton and Goldmark, one of the UK’s leading commercial galleries to stage this major new exhibition. The exhibition explores a fascinating period of mid-twentieth century British art from the neo-Romantics to the explosion of creativity unleashed by the end of the Second World War.
The exhibition showcases the best of the Mercer’s outstanding collection of pre and post war British art augmented by works from the Roebuck collection housed at Craven Museum, and Goldmark Gallery’s own superb collection of works from that era which are available for sale.
The exhibition’s title Look, Look Again! is taken from a quote by one of the most significant artists of the post war period - Prunella Clough. Clough’s work features significantly in the show thanks to a magnificent donation to the Mercer Gallery by the Yorkshire based writer, artist and photographer David Morgan Rees. The Morgan Rees collection – which features four exceptional works by Clough – includes original paintings and sketches by the likes of Keith Vaughan, John Minton, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Leonard Rosoman and John Craxton.
Red Riding and the Brothers Grimms exhibition
Dates: 22 January to 4 April 2025
Price: free
Christopher P Wood’s work features magical, symbolic figures and signs, what the artist calls ‘an exploration of the interior world of the imagination’. His latest collection of work is inspired by the disconcerting stories of Grimms’ fairy tales. The artist comments: “The Grimm’s fairy tales continue to inspire and renew themselves in the contemporary imagination, dealing, as they do, with those perennial and timeless matters of family, soul, justice, love, betrayal, redemption and the eternal conflicts of ethics and morality.
“It is in the archetypal landscapes, ancient spaces, dark forests, lonely towers and glass mountains of the world of Grimm that the imagery of the fairy tales come alive in all their inventive glory, and in doing so restore their grip on the imagination of each new generation that comes to them.”
Born in Leeds in 1961, Christopher P Wood gained a master’s degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 1986. He has consistently had successful exhibitions in the UK and abroad. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including Harrogate Art Gallery, Leeds City Council and the Unilever Collection.
Adrift on a Painted Sea exhibition
This exhibition is temporarily closed due to building works in the gallery.
Location: Mercer Gallery Studio
Dates: 16 November 2024 until 8 June 2025
Price: free
Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird is a beautiful and profound graphic novel that explores family, loss, and art through the author's relationship with his mother, Sue Bird, who painted as a hobby throughout her life. The exhibition displays a range of paintings by Sue Bird, alongside some artwork from the graphic novel, written by her son Tim after her death to celebrate her art and life. As well as paintings by Sue Bird and artwork from the novel, there will also be a display of sketches and sketchbooks.
Sue Bird was always painting: botanical art, landscapes, still lifes, and especially the sea. She took classes, kept countless sketchbooks, and filled the house with art. From their neighbourhood to their family trips to the North Yorkshire coast, all the moments of her life were memorialized in her artwork. Throughout her life, she never sold a piece - she gave art to family and friends and shared her work online, but never received wider recognition for her work. The new novel, Adrift on a Painted Sea, explores their family life and her creative explorations through a mix of her paintings and Tim's comics, depicting their relationship and her life from a teenager to her struggle with cancer at the height of the Covid pandemic.
Secrets of the Majestic exhibition
Dates: 15 November 2024 until 4 April 2025
Price: free
'Dare you enter... the toilets?'
This exhibition shows comic artwork inspired by the famous gents’ washroom of the Majestic Hotel - an opulent porcelain palace of gilded splendour.
Secrets of the Majestic is an 88-page comic book anthology of stories set in, and based around, this wondrous space and seeking to answer one burning question... Why are they like that?
The Majestic opened in 1900 as a grand new hotel for Harrogate’s affluent spa visitors. Famous for its plush décor and splendid service, the Majestic became a major landmark in the town, a by-word for classy luxury. Bizarrely, the hotel’s spacious, ground floor men’s washroom became a famous destination in its own right, with its black and white chequer-tiled floor, elegant wood panelling, Victorian brassware, and even a bench for visitors to sit and admire the magnificent surroundings.
For the past few years, artists and illustrators, too, have marvelled at these gents loos, when the Majestic has hosted the annual mid-convention party for Thought Bubble, the UK’s largest festival of comic art which draws international artists and fans to Harrogate each November.
Sheffield-based artist Chris Mole was inspired to put together a collection of short stories by comic artists, each exploring different explanations and theories for such an opulent porcelain palace, running the gamut from horror to action, to science fiction and fantasy. Secrets of the Majestic was successfully funded on Kickstarter in November 2023 and will debut at Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival 2024, accompanied by this exhibition of selected original artwork and pinups at the Mercer Art Gallery.
Supported by DoubleTree by Hilton Harrogate Majestic.
