About us

Focal Point Gallery (initiated 1991) is South Essex’s gallery for contemporary visual art, promoting and commissioning ambitious solo exhibitions, group shows, thematic projects, and a programme of public events including performances, film screenings and talks. The organisation is dedicated to national and international developments in visual culture, and in increasing access to the visual arts through its’ community, schools and education programme.

The gallery currently produces up to seven solo exhibitions each year, as well as working on a residency programme and a variety of offsite projects. Artists are given a platform to make new work in response to the gallery’s unique space on the second floor of Southend Central Library. The exhibitions, events and education programmes are currently being developed to include a series of activities that will host a diverse range of local and international artists, curators and writers, and establish ongoing collaborations with local and international arts organisations as well as engaging with a wide range of local community groups.

Since

2008, from its unassuming setting on the second floor of Southend Central Library, Focal Point Gallery has also started a transition towards becoming a regional curatorial laboratory intrigued by the potential of the wider Thames Gateway. With an accent on lens-based media within the expanded field of contemporary art, it will present a mixture of projects with a concern for unmanageable affirmative visual power, instances of literary inspired creativity, and dissenting photo / collage / performances, which aim to scramble history and memory, and question the current status of ‘the centre’, ‘the margin’ and ‘the periphery’. Artists confirmed for the 2009 / 2010 programme include Alastair MacKinven, Clunie Reid, Milly Thompson, Erik Blinderman, Tris Vonna-Michell, Petra Bauer and Stuart Whipps, as well as curators and writers such as Mike Sperlinger, Dan Kidner, George Clark, and Cedar Lewisohn. Through forms of recalcitrant optimism, and with partners on a local and international level, Focal Point Gallery aims for nothing less than a paradigm shift in its audience’s perception

of contemporary social and political reality. We urge you to run from London and join us.

Focal Point Gallery is a regularly funded organisation of Arts Council England. It also receives regular support from Southend Borough Council. The programme receives additional funding from other sponsors, trusts and foundations. Focal Point Gallery also collaborates with partners including arts agencies and other organisations to co-produce projects.

Focal Point Gallery
Registered office:
Southend Central Library
Victoria Avenue
Southend-on-Sea
Essex SS2 6EX, UK