SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Gallery Wendi Norris announced its representation of the estate of Eileen Agar (1899-1991).
An artist whose life spanned nearly the entire 20th century, Eileen Agar was a radical woman of her times: transcontinental worldliness simultaneously deeply informed and belied her highly personal, unconventional artworks. Born in Argentina to Scottish and American parents, Agar was, from the outset, a traveler. With her formative youth spent in South America and adulthood in the United Kingdom and Europe, her external travels were mirrored by internal explorations, mining her own and society’s unconscious to produce works that consistently align and juxtapose the recognizable with the mysterious.
“I am honored to work with this important material, '' said Wendi Norris. “In 2023 my gallery will present the first solo exhibition for Eileen Agar in the United States. We will introduce her work to our global audience at Frieze Masters in the form of an homage to Agar’s use of nature as her muse, alongside similarly-themed paintings and drawings by peers Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Dorothea Tanning.”
Agar is often categorized as a surrealist, but her vast oeuvre reveals both her versatility and her dedication to a variety of forms and contexts that make this nomenclature too constrained. In fact, the artist Shezad Dawood has said of her, “She is so much more than one artist. She is at least five artists in one,” a statement which not only refers to her ability to shape-shift, but also makes her enormously relevant to the many contemporary artists who are committed to a transdisciplinarity that she fully embraced.
Indeed, Agar engaged in painting, drawing, collage, bricolage, photography, and the production of a journal titled The Island that, tellingly, combined nature and mysticism, enduring themes for the artist. Agar’s form of surrealism is one that creates sparks between unrelated objects and forms. Rather than cultivating an interest in autonomism, Agar’s selections were highly intentional and bore a formal and spiritual relationship to one another. From pinning actual starfish and other items from the sea to collages and into sculptures, to embedding crocheted elements into paintings, Agar produced images and forms that are both recognizable and mysterious.
For example, her Marine Object from 1939 conjoins a fragment of an amphora she found in fishermen’s nets amidst their haul, which she combined with shells and other flotsam from the sea. She balances this with a ram’s horn to create an object that melds the terrestrial with the oceanic, in a characteristically awkwardly balanced form. It seems to be at once something that could be found on the beach, a relic of another time, or a devotional object.
Agar also melded organic forms with geometries and abstraction, most visible in paintings that figured both. Take, for instance, her 1963 painting Apocalyptic Head, which combines a contoured face staring out of the panel within a frame of abstraction. Starburst forms invade the forehead while two brown and beige verticals create an architecture that holds the head in place. This is surrounded by other starbursts and squiggles in blue, green, and black, as well as a familiar shell form, which together give the impression of a turbulent sea surrounding the distraught portrait. The combination of abstraction with organic and figural elements, both real and imagined, together create a possibility of alternate worlds, conjoining surrealism and abstraction in ways more integrated than typically acknowledged in mainstream art history.
Born in Buenos Aires, Agar moved to England aged seven and went on to study art at the Brook Green School and then at the Slade before relocating to Paris in 1928. Over the course of her career, Agar would associate with artists including Henry Moore, Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Nash, and with writers such as Joseph Bard, Ezra Pound, and Paul Eluard. Throughout the 1930s, she produced a series of sculptures and assemblages that were inspired by the discarded shells, bones, and bits of plankton she would collect while beachcombing on the French coast. One of her most notable assemblages from this time was Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, a painted basket topped with pieces of bone, coral, lobster, and a starfish. Captured on film, Agar famously walked along the streets of London wearing this bizarre creation.
Agar was one of only a handful of women artists who took part in the seminal International Surrealist Exhibition at London's New Burlington Galleries in 1936, a landmark show that launched Surrealism in Britain. This was followed by inclusion later that year in Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. By the end of the decade, Agar had created one of her most important works, Angel of Anarchy, a blind-folded plaster head to which she added feathers, fabric, and diamante stones. Based on an earlier plaster head, Agar described wanting to make this new work "more powerful, more astonishing, more malign."
Aside from a solo show at the Redfern in 1942, Agar largely ceased exhibiting and making work during and just after World War II. A trip to Tenerife in 1953 instantly renewed and catalyzed her aesthetic powers. She completed a series of watercolors while there and, upon returning home, committed herself to the exploration of new subject matter and to new ways of making pictures. Henceforth working primarily as a painter, Agar experimented with automatism and became interested in the textural properties of paint. At some point in the late 50s, she began dripping and pouring enamel paint onto canvas or glass, resulting in a series of beguiling, abstracted images.
In 1965, Agar turned her hand to the fast-drying medium of acrylics, allowing her to further experiment with pigment and color combinations. Among the most notable of her acrylic paintings are those inspired by the famous rocks of Ploumanach. Agar had initially documented the rocks in 1936 with a series of haunting black and white photographs that emphasized their strange, anthropomorphic qualities. Several decades later, Agar employed heightened color, jarring juxtapositions, and altered perspectives in her reinterpretation of these rocks. Publishing an autobiography and winning election to the Royal Academy on either side of her ninetieth birthday, she remained imaginatively and productively undiminished to the very end.
Since her death in 1991, Agar’s influence and reputation have continued to deepen. Agar retrospectives have been held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Pallant House Gallery, the Jerwood, and the Whitechapel Gallery. In the past two years, Agar’s work has been included in the 59th Venice Biennale and Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Tate Modern,
