royal west of england academy (RWA)…

The Grade II* Listed RWA building has opened its doors again after a £4.1 million extensive repair and refurbishment project – thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Since we first moved to Bristol in 2003, we’ve regularly visited the art gallery and, as you might imagine (with it being only a 15-minute walk up Park Street from our ‘new’ abode), it’s been somewhat frustrating that its temporary closure more or less coincided with our move from Southville.
The art gallery re-opened at the weekend and I dropped in yesterday to take in its first main exhibition (“Me, Myself, I: Artists’ Self-Portraits” - an exploration of self-portraiture over the last three hundred years), featuring such artists as Antony Gormley, Gillian Wearing, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Joshua Reynolds, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Patrick Heron, Dod Procter, John Minton, Roger Fry and many more.
I very much enjoyed it and, thanks to my RWA Art Pass (purchased for an annual fee of £15 – brilliant value), I can visit as many times as I like for ‘free’.
Photo: Just a few of the images that caught my eye (clockwise, starting top left: John Minton; Antony Gormley, Stanley Spencer, Michael Craig-Martin, Dod Procter, Roger Fry, Arthur Hayward and Jacqueline Donachie.
PS: Work on the café isn’t quite yet completed, but the very good news is that it’ll be run by Bristol’s excellent “Spicer+Cole” (probably the best coffee in Bristol, in my view).