About

Comrades in Art will be the most comprehensive exhibition on the anti-fascist Artists International Association ever staged and the first in over 40 years to focus on the AIA as a central theme.

This exhibition will highlight the life and work of 11 members of the founding generation of the Artists International Association (AIA): Peggy Angus, Pearl Binder, James Boswell, James Fitton, Margaret Fitton, James Holland, Percy Horton, Peter Laszlo Peri, Betty Rea, Cliff Rowe and Nan Youngman. Their work will be shown alongside works by prominent AIA exhibiting artists including Ithell Colquhoun, Dame Laura Knight, Paul Nash and Lucien Pissaro, who supported the organisation and its campaigns for peaceful and cultural development and international understanding.

About the Artists International Association

The AIA was established in 1933 to unify artists against facisim and war, rallying comrades across Europe during the Spanish Civil War and efforts to overcome the rise of facsist General Francisco Franco. The artists involved worked across a range of styles and the Association also focused on wider access to art, through affordable lithograph prints and mural commissions.

More about the exhibition

The exhibition at Towner is based on extensive new archival and collections-based research conducted by author and curator Andy Friend and published by Thames & Hudson in his book, Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism, 1933-1943, with a foreword by Frances Spalding.

Comrades in Art will be the most comprehensive exhibition on the AIA ever staged and the first in over 40 years to focus on the AIA as a central theme. It builds on Andy Friend's recent display in Tate Britain's Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky Archive Gallery (July 2024 to April 2026), exploring the founding of the AIA through archive material in their collection.

The third collaboration between Andy Friend and Towner Eastbourne, it follows the success of the exhibitions and publications Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship (2017-2018) and John Nash: the Landscape of Love and Solace (2021).