John Hansard Gallery is pleased to present Derek Jarman's Modern Nature, curated with author Philip Hoare.

Derek Jarman's Modern Nature draws on Derek Jarman's extraordinary legacy as a radical artist, filmmaker, writer, gardener, and activist.

The exhibition specifically focuses on his lifelong passion for plants, the human body, the landscape and the greater environment, as evidenced in the living artwork that is Prospect Cottage and its shingle garden in Dungeness, Kent. Created between 1987 and 1994, the house and garden continue Jarman's legacy into the 21st century as a kind of barometer of the deep past and the near future.

Expanding on Jarman's time-travelling aesthetic, Derek Jarman's Modern Nature will include rarely seen examples of his earliest landscape paintings, from the 1960s up to his vibrant late paintings of Dungeness from the 1990s. These will be presented in correspondence with works by Neo-Romantic artists such as John Minton, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Keith Vaughan; from the surrealists, Eileen Agar and John Banting, through to Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance darkness, all seeking to explore the depth of Jarman's influences and intuitions. The landscape becomes the body becomes the augury; at once mystical, alchemical, threatened, and fluid.