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Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art

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Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art

"Whenever I visit the North-East, it's to Sunderland that I look for excellent contemporary art exhibitions." Gill Hedley

Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art has been bringing art from around the world to Sunderland and revealing the depth of talent in the North-East for 50 years. Working closely with artists, it stages exhibitions and events, creates publications and most recently, has begun to create a collection of contemporary art for the future. Since 2017, the gallery has been based inside National Glass Cent

re, where it has focused on new work made in photography, film & video, and twenty-first century media. National newspapers once described it as “the best small gallery” in the north-east, but its new home facing onto the north sea has five metre high ceilings that can present every type of artwork at its best. The gallery has a reputation for identifying new talent locally and internationally, having awarded artists with their first ever public exhibitions from Sean Scully in 1972 through to Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. It has brought artists who have never shown in the UK to these shores from Cory Arcangel to Harun Farocki.

04/06/2026

The final touches are being made to our new exhibitions which open to the public on Saturday. We can't wait for you all to view the fabulous works on show.

▶ If you simply can't wait to see Hands On and Anna-Marie Gallares: I Carry It With Me join us for the preview on Friday 5 June from 4pm.

🎟 Book your free tickets: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/preview-hands-on-pedagogy-practice-research-anna-marie-gallares-i-carry-it-with-me/

▶ Drinks on arrival. On-site parking available.

🙏Supported by University of Sunderland, Arts Council England, Sunderland City Council, UK Government.

03/06/2026

Be the first to see our new exhibitions. 📢

Join us on Friday for the preview of Hands On: Pedagogy, Practice, Research and Anna-Marie Gallares: I Carry It With Me.

▶ Drinks on arrival. On-site parking available.

📅 Friday 5 June
▶ 4pm - 6pm / Free - Booking essential
Limited free tickets available.

ℹ Book now: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/preview-hands-on-pedagogy-practice-research-anna-marie-gallares-i-carry-it-with-me/

🙏Supported by University of Sunderland, Arts Council England, Sunderland City Council, UK Government.

🖌 Image: Hannah Gawne, Mixed Up Dotty Mess, 2026, screenprint, 52 x 52cm. Courtesy of the artist

31/05/2026

New Exhibition Incoming 📢

▶ Hands On: Pedagogy, Practice, Research celebrates University of Sunderland’s bold approach to world leading contemporary Fine Art education and cultivating the connections between pedagogy, art making and creative practice research.

📅 Opens Saturday 6 June
▶ 10am - 5pm / Free
📍Showing in Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art Main Gallery

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/hands-on-pedagogy-practice-research/

🖌 Image: Lothar Goetz, Portrait of a Modernist - White (extract), 2019, watercolour and pencil on paper, 42 x 29.7cm. Photo: Michael Franke. Courtesy of the artist.

30/05/2026

With only six days until the previews of Hands On and Anna-Marie Gallares: I Carry It With Me, our gallery team are making great progress getting everything ready, with lots of help from Anna-Marie herself.

Be the first to see our latest exhibitions before they open to the public.
▶ Join us for the preview on Friday 5 June
🕧 4pm - 6pm
▶ Free - booking essential
▶ Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art at National Glass Centre
▶ Everyone welcome / Drinks on arrival / On-site parking available.

⚠ Limited availability - Secure your free tickets now
🎟 Book now: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/preview-hands-on-pedagogy-practice-research-anna-marie-gallares-i-carry-it-with-me/

🙏Supported by University of Sunderland, Arts Council England, Sunderland City Council, UK Government.

29/05/2026

Join us for the preview of our latest exhibitions – Hands On: Pedagogy, Practice, Research and Anna-Marie Gallares: I Carry It With Me.

▶ Drinks on arrival. On-site parking available.

📅 Friday 5 June
▶ 4pm - 6pm / Free - Booking essential

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/preview-hands-on-pedagogy-practice-research-anna-marie-gallares-i-carry-it-with-me/

🙏Supported by University of Sunderland, Arts Council England, Sunderland City Council, UK Government.

🖌 Image: Hannah Gawne, Mixed Up Dotty Mess, 2026, screenprint, 52 x 52cm. Courtesy of the artist.

22/05/2026

New Exhibition Incoming 📢

▶ We are delighted to announce Hands On: Pedagogy, Practice, Research. Showing in our Main Gallery from Saturday 6 June.

▶ Hands On: Pedagogy, Practice, Research celebrates University of Sunderland’s bold approach to world leading contemporary Fine Art education and cultivating the connections between pedagogy, art making and creative practice research.

▶ The exhibition showcases University of Sunderland Fine Art’s internationally recognised teaching, artistic and creative practice research, including academics, creative technicians and practice-based PhD and research community.

▶Exhibited artists: Ralf Broeg, Victoria Doyle, Natalie Gale, Hannah Gawne, Lothar Goetz, Will Hughes, James Hutchinson, Craig Knowles, Dr Fiona Larkin, Graham Mitchinson, Paul Raymond, Speaking in Tongues, and Strange Quark Creative (James Stephen Wright and Polina Chizhova) – James Stephen Wright is a AHRC funded PhD student in Fine Art at University of Sunderland.

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/hands-on-pedagogy-practice-research/

👉 Hands On: Pedagogy, Practice, Research is curated by Dr Suzy O’Hara, produced by the Fine Art academic, technical and PhD team and reconfigured for this exhibition with Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.

🖌 Image: Lothar Goetz, Portrait of a Modernist - White, 2019, watercolour and pencil on paper, 42 x 29.7cm. Photo: Michael Franke. Courtesy of the artist.

21/05/2026

New exhibition incoming 📢

▶ We are delighted to announce NGCA Collection Space will host Anna-Marie Gallares: I Carry It With Me, the first UK institutional solo exhibition by Anna-Marie Gallares, a Filipina artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, from from Saturday 6 June.

▶ Working primarily with acrylic paint, Gallares’ work explores identity, memory, and the feeling of being between cultures. Gallares was born in the Philippines and moved to the UK at a young age, an experience that continues to shape her exploration of migration and cultural in-betweenness.

▶ I Carry It With Me features two bodies of work, the monumental painted tapestry A Year In My Life and four recent large-scale paintings.

▶ Gallares graduated from University of Sunderland BA Fine Art in 2023 with First Class Honours. In 2023, Anna-Marie received the New Graduate Award Residency at Middlesbrough Art Weekender and is currently a Breakthrough Artist Fellow with the Artist Futures Fund, developing new work through a studio residency at University of Sunderland.

▶ She has been shortlisted for the North East Emerging Artist Award 26/27 culminating in a group exhibition at Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland.

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/anna-marie-gallares-i-carry-it-with-me/

🖌 Image: Anna-Marie-Gallares, Passing Through, 2026, Acrylic paint on unstretched canvas, 140 x 110cm. Courtesy of the artist.

16/05/2026

Currently on display as part of the exhibition Smoke and Mirrors: Tim Brennan - The NORTH (2007)

▶ The NORTH was developed between 2005–2006 through a series of journeys across northern Britain.
What was encountered through travelling, arriving, stopping, and attending to particular conditions of light, weather and atmosphere was not sought out as subject matter but registered through presence.

▶ The photographs were made using deliberately limited means: a low-resolution mobile phone camera. Initially held in the palm of the hand, these small digital images were later enlarged to monumental size.

▶ What appears is not landscape as documentation, but an accumulation of looking over time. Colour, blur and surface displace descriptive clarity. The images hover between legibility and dissolution, between the particulars of a place and the refusal of representation.

📅 Smoke and Mirrors runs to Tuesday 26 May
▶ 10am - 5pm / Free / Monday - Saturday

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/smoke-and-mirrors-landscapes-from-the-ngca-collection/

14/05/2026

Currently on display as part of the exhibition Smoke and Mirrors: Chris Cornish - The Adventure and the Resolution (2010).

▶ With a practice underpinned by a history of technology, Chris Cornish utilises apparatus such as the camera and computer to explore a singular view of the world.

▶ Carefully exploring the interstices occurring between seemingly incompatible media, Cornish’s work seeks to lift information, objects, and surroundings from virtual or historical sources, and transform them to "real" space, recast as sculpture, photography, and film.

▶ The Adventure and the Resolution documents a computer-generated aberration; the creation of an illusion that must reveal its mechanics to be sustained.

▶ Situated in a computer representation of a real environment, the camera circles, producing a film loop that becomes a contemporary Zoetrope; a pre-film animation device creating the illusion of motion from a sequence of still images in a spinning cylinder with slits the user looks through as it rotates.

📅 Smoke and Mirrors runs to Tuesday 26 May
▶ 10am - 5pm / Free / Monday - Saturday

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/smoke-and-mirrors-landscapes-from-the-ngca-collection/

06/05/2026

Currently on display as part of the exhibition Smoke and Mirrors: Jeffrey Dennis - The Dry Well (2015)

▶ Jeffrey Dennis is a painter and Senior Lecturer on the Fine Art Programme at Chelsea College of Arts.

"My work is rooted in the daily experience of the city: how people move around, inhabit spaces and make sense of their daily routines. Of particular relevance to this and to the structure of my paintings are the ideas of proximity, contiguity and adjacency.

The paintings themselves provide a fluid, mutable net to hold narrative fragments and connective elements in place; a landscape corresponding to the fragmentary mental maps which people construct in order to give their existence some measure of meaning."

📅 Smoke and Mirrors runs to Tuesday 26 May
▶ 10am - 5pm / Free / Monday - Saturday

ℹ Find out more: https://www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/smoke-and-mirrors-landscapes-from-the-ngca-collection/

Address

C/o The National Glass Centre, Liberty Way
Sunderland
SR60GL

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 5pm
Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 5pm
Friday	10am - 5pm
Saturday	10am - 5pm

Telephone

+441915155555

Website

http://www.northerngalleryforcontemporaryart.org.uk/

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