Hastings Contemporary – until 5 January 2020

Hastings Contemporary is still better known to most people in Hastings as formerly the Jerwood Gallery. Hopefully this exceptional new exhibition will change that, for this is the finest use of the spacious building I have encountered since it opened.

The large, ground-floor room serves as an immersive introduction to an artist who has not had a full retrospective since his untimely death in 1988 from multiple-sclerosis. Towards the end of his life he was only able to paint holding the brush in his mouth and nudging it with his left hand. His colours had to be mixed by an assistant. Yet the impact of these late works, particularly the highly poignant portraits, is stunning.

We were privileged at the press showing to be introduced to Victor Willing’s work by his son, film-director Nick Willings who gave us an insight into his father’s approach to painting and the many very real social as well as medical problems he had to overcome. Taught originally at the Slade School, he needed to break away from the straight-jacket of formal painting being taught just after the war, but his style was not accepted, and dismissed as rubbish by conservative critics. He continued indomitably with his desire to paint what he saw in a series of visions, rather than the insistence on representing ‘reality’. It is these visions which form the heart of the exhibition.

The hang at Hastings Contemporary brings together the largest collection of his works ever mounted, with pictures loaned from a wide range of international sources. The vast canvases in the downstairs rooms give way to ones of more modest size but equal interest until one comes to the final portraits, including the deeply moving Self-Portrait at Seventy, as the artist considers what he might become if he had lived to seventy. There are also a collection of nude paintings most of which feature his wife in highly abstract settings, yet full of warmth and intimacy.

If you have possibly hesitated in visiting Hastings Contemporary I can only encourage you to go. The paintings are worth pausing over and the building is now seen at its best.