Exhibition: Wrexham Open 2018
2018-10-12 - 2018-12-16 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
12/10/2018 – 16/12/2018
An open entry exhibition, displayed across two venues in collaboration with Undegun Arts. A total of 260 works were displayed with four additional performances works taking place throughout the exhibition at both venues.
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The judges for Wrexham Open 2018 were Thomas Dukes, Rabab Ghazoul and Simon Job.
The prize winners were as follows:
Lesley James – Opposing Views (Judges’ Prize)
Austin Giffiths – Lucy (People’s Prize)
Louise Short – Sunset over Stanlow (Prize for Socially Engaged Practice)
Gideon Vass – 100 Pound Project (Young People’s Prize)
Alan Whitfield – Marram Grass House (Lens-based Media Prize)

Exhibition: The Tŷ Pawb Open 2024
2024-11-16 - 2025-02-08 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
The hugely popular Tŷ Pawb Open returns to Wrexham for its 4th edition.
The exhibition features over 100 artworks, including paintings, sculpture, ceramics, textiles & animations.
This follows a record response to our open call, with nearly 450 artists submitting works.
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This year’s Tŷ Pawb Open Judge is Alan Dunn
Alan Dunn is a Glasgow-born Artist based in Liverpool. He creates artworks using sound and digital images, collaborating with thousands of citizens to unlock the hidden narrative in communities. Alan is a Reader in Art and Design at Leeds Beckett University and is the current Wal Pawb Artist here at Tŷ Pawb as well as Lead Artist on our current Marchnad/Market Project.
Congratulations to our award winners:
Judges Prize (selected by guest judge, artist Alan Dunn): Anthony Jones.
Traders Prize (voted for by Tŷ Pawb’s market traders): Alan Roberts.

Exhibition: Allanol Always
2025-07-11 - 2025-10-25
Allanol Always was a solo show by Welsh-Ghanaian artist Anya Paintsil on view from July to November 2025.
Delving into the complex expectations placed on Black artists regarding beauty, heritage, and representation; Allanol Always challenges the problematic pressure to depict Black figures through the lens of European high art, and the marginalisation of African and Caribbean art histories.
Embracing Allanol Always as a space for artistic exploration and experimentation, the show represents a significant moment in Paintsil’s artistic journey and coincides with her permanent return to her hometown of Wrexham later this year. Developing an entirely new and experimental body of work, Paintsil will experiment with new materials and techniques, including innovative appliqué methods, textile assemblages using repurposed and waste fabrics, and a series of freestanding sculptures created in collaboration with her partner, weaver Steven William. These sculptural objects, inspired by Welsh mythology, lean towards abstraction, exploring themes of monstrous figuration and the grotesque.
Drawing from her childhood in North Wales, folklore and the Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil weaves together craft techniques from her youth – rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery – with those of afro hair styling methods to create bold, textural portraits. Referencing the enduring influence of traditional West African art in her work and the visual language rooted in the forms of the masks of Kongo peoples, Aku’aba dolls and Asafo Flags, Paintsil considers the stark disparities at play where white artists are celebrated for drawing from African art, labelled as ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ in a romanticised sense; whilst Black artists alluding to the very same traditions are at risk of misinterpretation as self-caricature or satire, which in turn reinforces harmful stereotypes.
Through Allanol Always, Paintsil looks to disrupt these restrictive narratives, advocating for a broader, more inclusive understanding of Black art outside of Eurocentric paradigms. The choice of the Welsh word ‘Allanol’, translating to “outside” or “external,” in the exhibition’s title speaks to the positioning of African art as “outsider art” within the dominant narratives of Western art history, an act of othering that Paintsil acknowledges and seeks to directly challenge in their work. The title also resonates with Paintsil’s artistic focus on the human body’s exterior and its significance in shaping individual and collective experiences from which she explores themes of identity, representation, and the complexities of the Black female experience.
For Paintsil, the implications of the title are deeply nuanced, as on a personal level “Allanol” echoes her own experience of otherness as an artist and a woman of colour, where even within her hometown she has at times felt an outsider navigating societal expectations and her own artistic vision.
Paintsil’s solo show explores creativity and creative license within Black figuration, inviting viewers to engage with the work on their own terms. Curated in collaboration with independent curator Lewis Dalton Gilbert, Allanol Always will be accompanied by a programme of community events at Tŷ Pawb.
About Anya Paintsil
Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in London and Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood in North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines craft practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create large scale portraits. Paintsils’ figures explore the possibilities and politics of non-representative depictions of the Black figure.
Often mistaken as subversion of ‘primitivism’, Paintsil deliberately and consciously refuses to root her work in the European Fine Art Canon, Paintsil’s visual language finds its basis in traditional West African Crafts and Art – carvings, wood sculptures, masks – exchanging the hard materials for soft, in an interrogation of gendered labour, particularly the labour of working class women.
Anya made her debut at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2020, and since then Anya has received sustained interest from private collectors and public institutions. Recent acquisitions include Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Wales, The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University.

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Print International 2025
2025-11-08 - 2026-01-24 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
Our biennial print exhibition returns!
Featuring:
East London Printmakers
Constructure
Printing in Dutch
Red Plate Press
Regional Print Centre
Spike Print Studio
Gallery opening times: Mon-Sat, 10am-4pm.
Most prints are for sale!

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Exhibition: Jonathan Le Vay - Opus
2026-02-07 - 2026-04-04 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
Jonathan Le Vay, born in London, studied at Cardiff College of Art (1979-82) and Cyprus College of Art (1985-86) has lived in North Wales for over 35 years. He is an accomplished pianist and jazz composer with a strong interest in the Visual Arts and is a respected curator.
This is a solo exhibition featuring large paintings using observation as a starting point for structure, pattern, composition, beautiful surfaces, colour and movement. These observed figurative elements are used as a vehicle for pleasurable expression and enable easily accessible optical enjoyment.
As an additional layer, some paintings will be paired to short pieces of original music accessed via QR code, offering a multi-sensory experience that will resonate with art and music lovers alike and give an insight into the mind of the artist.

Book Launch - John Byrne: Useful Art - How Activist Artists Can Change the World
2026-03-06 18:30 - 20:30 (Europe/London) | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
Launch event including an In Conversation with the author.
This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world.
Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of ‘Useful Art’ is helping artists and communities fight back against the neoliberal takeover of our spaces, services and lives.
Byrne demonstrates that networks of artist-led activism and community-based direct action can provide a collaborative playbook of impactful and inclusive alternatives. From Turner Prize-winning urban regeneration projects to bakeries, vegetable gardens and multi-use arts spaces, Useful Art has enormous potential for bringing people together, recovering and preserving local skills and knowledge and reclaiming artistic endeavour for real-world good.
Exploring an international selection of projects, exhibitions and activism, this important new work champions the shift from aesthetics to use value, challenging traditional ways of seeing the world symbolically through art. Reaching beyond the financial logic of the art world, Byrne shows how Useful Art can offer an artistic toolkit for implementing radical change.
This free launch event will include an In Conversation between John and Tŷ Pawb Creative Director Jo Marsh about the book, the journey that led John to writing it, and about some of the examples within it.
Light refreshments provided and the event is free to attend, and the book will be on sale on the night.
Book via eventbrite

Evening Gallery Tour with Jonathan Le Vay
2026-04-03 18:00 - 19:00 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
Overview

Artist-led Evening Gallery Tour: ‘Opus’ by Jonathan Le Vay
Join us for an evening in the gallery exploring the lush botanical paintings of Jonathan Le Vay. In this tour led by the artist, you’ll hear about Jonathan’s painting and musical processes and listen to musical compositions that complement the artworks.
Places on this tour are offered on a pay-what-you-can donation basis. Please book to avoid disappointment as places are limited. This tour is delivered in the medium of English.

Exhibition: Darch - You Have Done This Before
2026-04-18 - 2026-06-27 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
You Have Done This Before is an interactive installation and two-channel film exploring young people’s connections to nature through coming-of-age rituals.
Developed by DARCH – disabled Welsh artists Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel – the work draws on Somali, Indian and Welsh cultural lineages to create new rituals that honour the full personhood of children. Developed through workshops with young people in Wrexham, the project invites visitors to reflect on youth, lost wisdom and what it means to inherit a world shaped by climate crisis.
Join us for the joint launch event for DARCH – You Have Done This Before and our other new exhibition, Effaith – Disability Arts Cymru National Touring Exhibition (2025–26),
on Friday 17th April from 5.30pm

Exhibition: Effaith - Disability Arts Cymru National Touring Exhibition (2025–26)
2026-04-18 - 2026-06-27 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
Effaith is an exhibition showcasing disabled perspectives on one of the most urgent issues of our time: the climate crisis. Following an open call, selected disabled, d/Deaf and neurodivergent artists have responded to themes of nature, landscape and climate justice through the lens of disability.
The exhibition also showcases two commissions created as part of the Effaith project, one in partnership with Amgueddfa Cymru and one in partnership with Corsydd Calon Môn.
The commission with Amgueddfa Cymru is supported through CELF, the national contemporary art gallery of Wales initiative that fosters pathways for communities to engage with Wales’ art collection. This commission created an opportunity for the artist to respond to the Effaith theme and the National Collection at Amgueddfa Cymru. Kathryn Ashill was awarded this commission and has created work exploring the disabled body and its relationship to natural bodies of water.
Corsydd Calon Môn’s commission highlights the uniqueness and vulnerability of the Anglesey fens. Funded through the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Corsydd Calon Môn is a collaborative project that seeks to secure the future of the Anglesey Fens whilst celebrating their rich culture and heritage. The project raises awareness of the importance of the fens for people, for nature, and for fighting climate change. Catherine Taylor Parry was awarded the commission and has created work responding to the richness of the environment and reflecting on the fen as a natural record of time.
From February 2026 to March 2027, Effaith will tour across Wales to five leading galleries: Galeri, Caernarfon; Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham; g39 Cardiff; The Riverfront, Newport; and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth. The exhibition opens at Galeri, Caernarfon with a launch event on Friday 6 February.
Selected artists:
Adele Vye, Alison Robertson, Bev Bell Hughes, Beverly Marmont-Hill, Catherine Taylor Parry, Catrin Gwilym, Cerian Lloyd, Cheryl Beer, Dea Neile-Hopton, Durre Shahwar, Eileen Harrisson, Emma Frayne-Ford, Grant Lambie, Jane Campbell, Jamie Lawrence, Jill Powell, Kathryn Ashill, Linda and Bethany Sutton, Mars da Silva Saude, Polly Hill, Rhowan Alleyne on behalf of Ceredigion Animation Club, Rohan Powell, Sally Pearce, Tracey McMaster
With thanks to DAC Artist Booker T Photography, who creates inclusive artwork by making 3D tactile photo relief prints from 2D images. Booker has made 3D tactile relief prints for each piece of artwork in DAC’s National Touring Exhibition, Effaith, making the work accessible through touch.
With thanks to exhibition selectors:
Dr. Kate Brehme, BerlinKlusion, Germany
Bethany Handley, Writer / Poet / Disability Activist, Wales
Arty Jen Jo, Artist, Wales
Join us for the joint launch of Effaith and our other new exhibition, DARCH – You Have Done This Before, on Friday 17th April from 5.30pm

Exhibition: Anthony Shapland - murmur
2026-07-11 - 2026-10-31 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
A new solo show by Cardiff based artist and writer Anthony Shapland, guest-curated by Marie-Anne McQuay. The exhibition includes a new film and will be accompanied by an integrated reading space and events programme reflecting Shapland’s interest in the intersection between art and writing.
Tŷ Pawb is delighted to announce a large-scale solo exhibition by Cardiff based artist and writer Anthony Shapland, opening Summer 2026. Anthony Shapland is a Welsh artist, founder of artist-led space g39 and novelist. Within his writing and artistic practice, he blends documentary and fiction, drawing on his lived experience of rural queerness and growing up performing straight.
Exhibition runs: 11 July – 31 October 2026
Preview and Press View: 10 July 2026
Shapland was recently selected as one of The Observer’s 10 best new novelists 2025 and Waterstone’s Welsh book of the year for his debut novel A Room Above a Shop (Granta), which tells the story of hidden intimacy between two men living in a South Wales valley in the late 1980s, during the time of Section 28. Continuing to work between the gallery and the printed page, whether in image, text or film, Shapland constructs intimate portraits of lives lived at the edges of rural landscapes, often filmed on location around Bargoed, the town in the Rhymney Valley where he grew up. His ongoing fascination with illusion and mimicry, reflecting the ways in which his protagonists seek to blend in with their surroundings, manifests in his use of the hidden techniques of traditional filmmaking, including props, backdrops, filters, artificial light and Foley sound effects. These cinematic devices in turn set up and then unpack coded narratives. Speaking also to other concealed lives, the artist asks, “What happens when you stay?”
Shapland’s exhibition at Tŷ Pawb will include a new film and builds on recent moving image work, including Starling Seven (2025), in which a montage of starlings copy and repeat man-made noises, and Between the Dog and the Wolf (2019) which encapsulates the artist’s interest in the cinematic illusion of shooting day for night. The exhibition will be accompanied by an integrated reading space and a dynamic public programme.
Shapland’s solo show will be guest-curated by long time peer and associate Marie-Anne McQuay, previously curator of Liverpool Biennial 2025, with Tŷ Pawb Creative Director Jo Marsh.
Anthony Shapland said: “I’m excited to be working at Tŷ Pawb – exploring the space between exhibition and publication, image and word and referring to a life lived in two parts, performed – never what it seemed on the surface. Nothing is what it appears to be, and an early desire to not stand-out, even after coming-out, has had a lasting impact on all of my work – filled with references to stage and backstage, to a performance of life. At Tŷ Pawb I’m keen to blur the line between inside and outside the gallery. “
Creative Director Tŷ Pawb Jo Marsh said: “We are absolutely delighted to be presenting this exciting new body of work by Anthony Shapland here at Tŷ Pawb next year. Anthony is a truly cherished Welsh artist, at a significant moment in his career. This solo exhibition offers us a fantastic opportunity to engage with Anthony’s beautiful, poetic and unique vision and celebrate his significant contribution to contemporary art in Wales. We can’t wait to share it with our visitors. Building on our initial partnership as part of the Venice Biennale 2019, working with independent curator Marie-Anne McQuay on this project, fresh from her role as curator of Liverpool Biennial 2025, is a dream.”
Guest Curator, Marie-Anne McQuay said: “I’ve followed Anthony Shapland’s practice for nearly 20 years and am so delighted to finally work with him on a solo show for Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham. I’m looking forward to sharing his incredible sensibility for observation and detail, which manifests both in his filmmaking and writing, with audiences next year”
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Exhibition: The Tŷ Pawb Open
2026-11-14 - 2027-03-27 | Tŷ Pawb, Market Street, Wrexham, LL13 8BB
Our biennial open call exhibition returns for its 4th edition. The 2024 edition featured over 100 artworks, following a record response to our open call, with nearly 450 artists submitting works.
Details on how to submit artworks will be announced in the next few months.
Join our mailing list to get updates straight to your inbox.
