Martin Clark, the director of the Camden Art Centre in London, has been appointed director and chief executive of Towner Eastbourne gallery, replacing Joe Hill who stepped down to lead Yorkshire Sculpture Park earlier this year. Clark takes up the post in January 2027.
Towner Eastbourne, located on England’s south coast, was founded in 1923; its collection includes the largest body of work by Eric Ravilious (1903–1942) along with works by artists such as John Akomfrah, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Tacita Dean. The gallery jointly won Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2020 and hosted the Turner Prize in 2023.
Clark will lead the Towner Seven Sisters project at Black Robin Farm, a culture and education centre located in the South Downs National Park. The development of the new site, delivered in partnership with Eastbourne Borough Council, will begin early next year. Arts Council England awarded £750,000 to the scheme which also received a cash injection from the UK government’s levelling up fund.
The new venue will incorporate a new gallery building along with learning and community engagement spaces. Last year, Hill told Eastbourne Reporter: “We are not trying to recreate Towner up here. This brilliance of this site is as a farm: it’s not going to be a high-end art gallery.”
Crucially Clark’s departure opens up a vacancy at one of London’s most influential galleries where, according to a statement, “he has grown the organisation’s profile and visibility, both nationally and internationally”.
He joined Camden Art Centre in 2017, overseeing acclaimed exhibitions for artists such as Amy Sillman, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Martin Wong, Allison Katz, Lonnie Holley and Jesse Darling. Last year artists and galleries contributed to a £1.9m fundraising campaign enabling the centre to buy the lease on its building for the next 99 years.
Clark was previously director at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2007-13); he also served as artistic director at Tate St Ives (2007-13) and curator at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol (2005-07). He holds a Masters in Curating and Commissioning Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.
He told The Art Newspaper in 2023: “I used to think art was about communicating the experience of being alive or being human. But now I think art is a way to get closer to the truth, the reality, the condition or the nature of the world. Which sounds grandiose, but it can also be incredibly mundane or modest.”