Margate
TKE STUDIOS | TRACEY EMIN FOUNDATION
On now
- Sugar, We’re Going Down borrows its title from the Fall Out Boy song that soundtracked a particular corner of Alex Morante and Enrique López Llamas’s adolescence, an era that pretty much started with the collapse of the Twin Towers and sort of ended with sparkly-skinned vampires. Perhaps that’s why Morante and López Llamas share an attraction to bodies under pressure and to the strange images that pressure can produce. Morante’s ceramics twist bodily anxiety into deteriorated creatures that seem to be mutating into fragile, vulnerable, corroded beasts, as the awareness of a body breaking down gives way to the fear of what it might become. López Llamas’s painted sculptures stage catastrophic and melodramatic displays of unsettling associations, where the anxieties of adulthood in the present world meet the persistent fear of never being enough, or not being special at all. This shared bag of emotions finds a temporary home in a crumpled, reflective silver cave. The works, placed entirely on the floor, inhabit a space that resembles a bunker, a hideout, or the headquarters of someone who has spent too much time trying to figure out what is really going on. Its paranoid logic leaves us with the sense that something is coming, someone is listening, or that somewhere things have already gone terribly wrong. This duo-show marks the end of López Llamas and Morante’s six-month stay at the Tracey Emin Foundation’s Victoria House Residency. It embraces how things come to an end, how materials fail, how bodies misbehave, how plans inevitably go south, and how there can be some kind of special comfort in knowing that we are all going down.Description
Alex Morante & Enrique López Llamas - Sugar, We'Re Going Down
Until 1 Nov 2026
Recent past exhibitions
- Join us for the final exhibition by the current Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) cohort. This exhibition marks the culmination of 15 months of sustained studio practice, dialogue, and development at TKE Studios. Featuring work by: Olivia Guillot Olya Avstreyh Elizaveta Zalieva Valentina Attolini Anderson Asteclines Iyun Ola Sanyaolu Esme Keenleyside Kirubel Mandefro Javed Akhtar Further details on opening times and events will be announced soon.Description
Tears - Final Show
Ended 23 Aug 2026
- Johnnie Shand Kydd’s photographs emerge from a long engagement with the landscape of Ramsholt on Suffolk’s Bawdsey Peninsula. Made largely during daily walks through fields, river paths and woodland, the images record a place shaped equally by nature, memory and absence. Working with analogue cameras and film, Shand Kydd embraces slowness, chance and imperfection. Each photograph is the result of observation repeated over time rather than a single decisive moment. The resulting works carry a quiet sense of history, tracing the lingering presence of those who once lived and worked within this seemingly ordinary landscape.Description
Johnnie Shand Kydd: Ramsholt
Ended 7 Jun 2026
- Tracey Emin Foundation presents new paintings by Jack Hirons marking the culmination of his year as the Dame Tracey Emin Fellow. Over the course of the fellowship, Hirons refined his focused approach to monochrome painting, working with careful control of pigment, tone and surface.The paintings draw on landscape imagery and recurring forms such as reflections and pathways. The works do not describe a specific location. Instead, they consider how images arise from physical matter and how material moves through cycles of change. Hirons approaches painting as a process of transformation, where the image remains connected to the world from which it comes.The exhibition brings together paintings developed during a year of sustained studio work and ongoing dialogue.Description
Jack Hirons: The Journey
Ended 7 Jun 2026
- Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 April 10:00–14:00 (both days) Join Ted Rogers for a 2-day immersive dance experience exploring performative improvisation, emotional choreographic practice, and a deeper dive into our shared dance routine. Across the weekend, you’ll develop a felt understanding of intuitive movement — learning how to “channel” expression, move through emotional blocks, and begin weaving your own expressive language. Revisiting the choreography on day two allows the body time to integrate (it’s amazing what shifts after the movement has had time to marinate). We’ll warm up, cool down, rest, work deeply — and have a lot of fun. This weekender is open to anyone curious about dance as a way to connect to self and others. No professional experience needed — all levels welcome. 🔥 Expect to sweat 👕 Wear clothes you can move freely in 💧 Bring water 💛 Come open-hearted Ted Rogers is a multidisciplinary artist based at TKE Studios, Margate. Their work explores the body as a site of emotion, memory, and romance — gritty and tender at once. With a lifetime of performance spanning theatre, film, galleries, fashion, and nightlife, Ted continues to work internationally as a choreographer and movement director alongside a fine-art practice.Description
Ted Rogers Dance Weekender
Ended 12 Apr 2026
Both of our current exhibitions
Ended 29 Mar 2026
- Vincent Hawkins’ ‘A Line of Ashes’ Preview 7 February 6-8pm 8 February – 29 March 2026 TKE Studios, Margate Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12–5pm TKE Studios is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent works by Vincent Hawkins Hawkins’ paintings and prints are built through accumulation, abrasion, and revision. Surfaces are worked, scraped back, and reworked, carrying the trace of decisions made and undone. Lines appear, disappear, and reassert themselves, creating a quiet tension between structure and instability. The work is not concerned with collapse as an endpoint, but with what follows it. These surfaces suggest a state after breakdown, where forms reassemble, adapt, and open onto new possibilities. What emerges feels provisional rather than resolved, shaped by pressure, repetition, and necessity rather than certainty. There is a strong sense of containment throughout the work, a continual negotiation between control and release. Nothing is fixed. Each painting feels as though it has arrived at its current state through persistence rather than intention. Hawkins has lived and worked in Margate for the past two years, and this exhibition marks an important presentation of his practice within the town. Bringing together painting and printmaking, the works continue his long-standing engagement with material processes, repetition, and the slow logic of making.Description
A Line of Ashes
Ended 29 Mar 2026
- TKE Studios presents This Is Love, a group exhibition bringing together a diverse selection of artists working across painting and ceramic. Installed in the lower gallery, the exhibition offers a constellation of approaches to intimacy, attention, memory and material exploration. Rather than proposing a single definition, This Is Love considers love as a broad and open field: love of process, love of image-making, love of objects, and the quieter forms of care and observation that underpin sustained artistic work. The works in the exhibition range from the personal to the playful, from reflective to tactile, creating a space where different sensibilities and voices can sit alongside one another. The exhibition features work by Olya Avstreyh, Brogan Bertie, Olivia Guillot, Esme Keenleyside, Keziah, Joline Kwakkenbos, Studio Lenca, Mercedes Lucy, Kirubel Mandefro, Gabriela Max, Ted Rogers, IyunOla Sanyaolu and Elizaveta Zalieva.Description
This Is Love
Ended 29 Mar 2026
Tracey Emin / Bronwyn Oliver
Ended 19 Mar 2026