Photo: Firstsite
Simon Carter: From the Landscape
19 Sep 2026 - 17 Jan 2027
One of the year's MUST-SEE exhibitions
This exhibition is undoubtedly a watershed for one of the most popular, established and best-known artists in the East of England. The main exhibition hall of Firstsite is being rebuilt to reflect the psychogeography of Carter's love affair with Essex's estuarine environment, the most significant, recurring subject in his oeuvre. And this will be a huge solo exhibition -- one part retrospective, one part painted specifically for this exhibition.
Step inside a giant painting and get lost in a landscape drawn from the Essex coast. The exhibition brings together more than thirty acrylic paintings and drawings made since 2020, an early watercolour Simon Carter painted at twenty-three, and three new series made especially for Firstsite.
Existing and new works are hung over newly painted surfaces that respond to Firstsite's architecture, light and atmosphere, so that paint, process and memory are layered together. There are multiple entrances and exits, and viewpoints framed after the bird hides and pillboxes found along the Essex coast, which means there is no single route through and the show looks different depending on where you stand. Paintings spill onto the gallery walls, and a soundscape made from recordings Carter captured on his daily walks brings the coast indoors.
One wall, a nineteen-metre groyne, carries five hundred monochrome painted sketches that move across it like a gust of wind, gathering intensity at the centre.
Carter has walked, drawn and painted the landscape around him for more than forty years from his base in Frinton. From the Landscape gathers that long relationship with the Essex coast and countryside into a show that asks us to look at painting differently: he builds up layers of colour and texture over months and sometimes years, so that traces of places, plants, views and memories are held within each work, echoing the layers of the landscape itself.
Simon Carter is an artist and curator who studied at Colchester Institute and then North East London Polytechnic. In 2013 he formed the artist-led group Contemporary British Painting with Robert Priseman, and then the East Contemporary Art Collection, the first collection of contemporary art dedicated to the East of England, now housed at the University of Suffolk in Ipswich. He is President of Colchester Art Society, has been artist in residence at both the University of Essex and Firstsite, and is represented by Messum's.
The exhibition is supported by Firstsite Collectors' Group and Trevor Fenwick.