New experimental art gallery launches in Brighton

This May, a new chapter in Brighton’s contemporary art landscape unfolds as The Adelaide Salon, in collaboration with Brighton Festival, presents Act 0 inaugurating the Founders Room as a gallery space for Brighton Festival 2026.

A spokesman said: “Act 0 introduces the Founders Room as a new site for artistic experimentation, highlighting process-led, relational and interdisciplinary practices at the heart of the city’s evolving visual arts programme.

“By opening its spaces to contemporary artistic experimentation, Brighton Dome and Festival reinforces its role not only as a leading performance venue, but as an active site to support visual art, discourse and cross-disciplinary collaboration during Brighton Festival and beyond.

“The exhibition continues Adelaide Salon’s commitment to supporting contemporary art while cultivating new forms of cultural exchange in Brighton, such as with their major art gala with the Royal Pavilion at the end of May.”

Paulina Anzorge, of The Adelaide Salon, said: “We are incredibly excited to see Brighton Dome and Festival open its doors to visual art in this way. The creation of the Founders Room as an experimental gallery marks a meaningful shift – not only for the institution, but for the city. It signals a commitment to artists, to process, and to the kind of work that needs space to unfold.”

Lucy Davies, CEO of Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival, added: “This collaboration animates our public spaces at Brighton Dome, for audiences and artists. Brighton Festival is a time when we throw our arms open to local, national and international artists and I am thrilled to enable The Adelaide Salon and Act 0 to be part of that ambition, alongside a city-wide visual art programme.”

Paulina added: “At its core, Act 0 asks a fundamental question: where does the artist end and the artwork begin?

“Turning attention to the threshold between life and form, the exhibition considers whether the artist can be located within the work itself and how much of a lived experience remains once it has been translated into material.

“Each work is approached as both trace and declaration: where thinking, living and making converge.

“Bringing together two artist couples, Isobel Smith and The Baron Gilvan, and Lucy Newman and Bob Dixon, Act 0 explores artistic practice as something relational and continuously formed through proximity, shared environments and exchange. Here authorship is not fixed, but entangled, negotiated and lived.

“Across painting, drawing and performance-led practices, the works move between inner and outer worlds. Gestures, materials and recurring motifs operate as fragments, partial disclosures of thought and experience that remain suggestive rather than complete.

“Each artist contributes a distinct yet interconnected response to the exhibition’s central enquiry.

“Working across performance and material practice, Isobel Smith seeks to dissolve boundaries between self and environment. Through everyday objects and natural materials, she inhabits hybrid states that blur distinctions between the human and nonhuman.

“The Baron Gilvan’s paintings and drawings unfold as fragments of a visual opera. Moving between absurdity and reverie, his works stage psychological states – collapse, devotion, grief and reinvention – where ruin becomes a site of transformation.

“Lucy Newman engages everyday artefacts alongside expansive historical and geological references. Through illusion, primary colour and material transformation, her work interrogates perception while maintaining an acute sensitivity to surface and presence.

“Rooted in dérive and durational observation, Bob Dixon’s practice examines the relationship between seeing and knowing. His drawings operate as visual diaries, while paintings and prints emerge from symbolic inner worlds shaped by alchemy, ecology and ritual.”

Act 0: Founders Room Gallery, Brighton Dome, New Road, Brighton, May 2026 (as part of Brighton Festival), is open to Brighton Dome Concert Hall event ticket holders before their show.

Founded in Brighton by Paulina Anzorge and Pascal Dowers, The Adelaide Salon is a contemporary arts platform reimagining the historic European salon as a space for interdisciplinary exchange, artistic experimentation and cultural dialogue.