The German conceptual artist is the subject of the latest Artist Rooms exhibition, this time at the seaside De La Warr Pavilion. Simon Tait reports.
The tax driver isn’t impressed by Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion. “Looks all right from the beach, but the backside that faces the town looks like a car showrooms. Hate it. And it’s all for the arty people, nothing for the locals as it was meant to be”.

He probably won’t feel any more positive about the new exhibition at the De La Warr, but the arty people will like it. If it comes off, a few more besides, and maybe one or two locals.

In fact, despite its avant garde nature, the De La Warr’s director Alan Haydon thinks Bexhill will love it.

The exhibition title, Beuys is Here, reflects the surprise of the choice of location for such art for some, but it’s the De La Warr’s choice from the Artist Rooms tour. This is the extraordinary series of work by key modern and contemporary artists collected by the dealer Anthony D’Offay and donated to the nation via the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, half way through this first year’s journeying, for which key galleries around the country make bids with their proposals which D’Offay himself vets. Among the showings already, Wolverhampton and Walsall have had Warhol, Glasgow has had Bruce Nauman, Middlesbrough Gerhard Richter, Cardiff Diane Arbus, and Inverness Robert Mapplethorpe. Tate has had a huge bite with LeWitt in Liverpool, Gilbert & George at Millbank, Anselm Kiefer/Ed Ruscha and others at Bankside and Lawrence Weiner at St Ives.

But this is the one Haydon wanted: Joseph Beuys, the sculptor, painter, conceptualist, performance artist, humanist, theorist and social philosopher who died in 1986.

“It’s a great opportunity, particularly in a building founded upon socialist principles and cultural democracy, so where better to begin with Beuys than here” he said. “And we particularly wanted to test the sense of Joseph Beuys the artist, the man, and some of the issues that he was trying to confront during his lifetime, and where that is today, testing it with new generations of audiences, new generations of artists some of whom didn’t have the fortunate opportunity that I did as a young artist to meet him and be quite heavily influenced by him. The great thing for us is just to bring it out of the metropolis into a relatively small town and see it in a different setting.”