Busy year ahead for gallery

Among the highlights will be:

n Robin and Lucienne Day: Design and the Modern Interior, March 26-June 26.

Robin (born 1915) and Lucienne Day (1917-2010) are among the most celebrated British designer couples of the post-war era.

Working in a range of media, they pioneered the introduction of modern design during the 1950s and 1960s, sharing a commitment to low-cost, mass-produced, good-quality furniture and fabric.

This new exhibition drawn from the collection of H Kirk Brown III and Jill A Wiltse in Denver USA focuses on the furniture designs of Robin Day and textile designs of his late wife Lucienne and will fittingly be held in Chichester, the Days’ home town.

n In Focus Exhibition – A Passion for Prints: Ten Years of the Golder-Thompson Gift, March 19–June 19.

Since 2001 Mark Golder and Brian Thompson have presented more than 160 contemporary prints to Pallant House Gallery.

His gift provides a unique overview of recent developments in printmaking across the UK and Ireland – especially Scottish printmakers including Elizabeth Blackadder, Christine Borland, Callum Colvin, Martin Boyce, Peter Howson, Callum Innes, Barbara Rae, David Shrigley, and Adrian Wiszniewski, the Welsh artists David Tress, Laura Ford, and David Nash, the Irish artists Alice Maher, Hughie O’Donaghue, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Gwen O’Dowd, and artists based in England including Paula Rego, Ana Maria Pacheco, Neeta Madahar and Arturo di Stefano.

The most recent purchase: The House of Fairytale Portfolio of 22 prints will be displayed as a trail throughout the galleries and includes works by Fiona Banner, Spartacus Chetwynd, Mat Collishaw, Dexter Dalwood, Bob & Roberta Smith, Kiki Smith, Gavin

Turk, and Rachel Whiteread,

n Mervyn Peake: A Centenary Celebration, April 9–July 17.

British writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake has earned an international cult following for his Gormenghast series of Gothic fantasies which were inspired by Arundel Castle.

To mark what would have been his hundredth birthday, Pallant House Gallery presents a display of his most famous illustrations and prints as part of the major centenary celebrations which will also include the publication of Titus Awakes, the final part of the Gormenghast sequence recently completed by his widow.

n Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, July 9–October 9. The artistic, political and private lives of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957) have attained a mythological status. For a quarter of a century they were passionate companions and their marriage, divorce, remarriage, love affairs, separations and politics were chronicled in their paintings.

n Butlins’ 75th Anniversary, June 25–October 2. Butlins’ holiday camps first opened in 1936 as holiday centres for the great mass of working-class families, becoming a familiar part of British culture and folklore. Pallant House Gallery has programmed two complementary exhibitions to celebrate the 75th anniversary of this iconic English institution.

The John Hinde photographs, which were produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a series of postcards, are elaborately stage-managed, often with large casts of real holidaymakers acting their allocated roles.