‘I have spent my life in revolt against convention’, Eileen Agar (b.1899, Buenos Aires; d.1991, London) once stated, ‘trying to bring colour and light and a sense of the mysterious to everyday existence’. A pioneer of surrealism both in Britain and internationally, Argentine-British artist Eileen Agar's inaugural exhibition at Alison Jacques illustrates her practice of resisting formal stylistic labels. Instead, her ‘highly personal combinations of form and content’ reflects the curious, travelled eye she cast upon the world. Agar sought to combine tenets of surrealism with facets of cubism and abstraction, challenging the precepts that defined such movements, as well...
‘I have spent my life in revolt against convention’, Eileen Agar (b.1899, Buenos Aires; d.1991, London) once stated, ‘trying to bring colour and light and a sense of the mysterious to everyday existence’. A pioneer of surrealism both in Britain and internationally, Argentine-British artist Eileen Agar's inaugural exhibition at Alison Jacques illustrates her practice of resisting formal stylistic labels. Instead, her ‘highly personal combinations of form and content’ reflects the curious, travelled eye she cast upon the world. Agar sought to combine tenets of surrealism with facets of cubism and abstraction, challenging the precepts that defined such movements, as well as the male dominance that pervaded them.
Agar was notably one of the few women included in the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London in 1936, showing assemblages ‘Ceremonial Hat’ and ‘Angel of Anarchy’. Other epoch-defining exhibitions in which Agar participated include: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA, New York (1937), 31 Women, Art of this Century, New York (1943) and The Art of Assemblage, MoMA, New York (1961).
After the war, in the succeeding two decades, Agar presented sixteen solo exhibitions, reflecting the extent of her acclaim. Throughout her experimental, boundary-pushing art, Agar delved into her rich interior world and conceived of ‘womb magic’ – a feminine type of imagination which sought to undo the ‘rampant hysterical militarism’ she witnessed around her. Concerned by the rise of fascism on the continent, Agar dug her own philosophical and creative well that she drew on for the rest of her life, a pursuit she recounted in her memoir A Look at My Life in 1988, and continued until her death in 1991.
