Artists

Eileen Agar

Press release

My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting. – Eileen Agar, 1988 Alison Jacques is delighted to present our first exhibition of Eileen Agar (b.1899, Buenos Aires; d.1991, London) since announcing European representation of the Estate of Eileen Agar. One of the most distinctive figures associated with British Surrealism, Agar was among the few women included in the landmark 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London. She participated in defining international exhibitions, including Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1937), 31 Women at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, New York (1943), and The Art of Assemblage at MoMA (1961). In 2021, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, presented Angel of Anarchy, a major retrospective of Agar’s work comprising over 150 works, curated by Laura Smith. In 2024, Thames and Hudson published A Look at My Life, a new edition of Agar’s long-out-of-print autobiography, originally published in 1988, which tells the story of her extraordinary life. Throughout her career, Agar developed an artistic language that resisted fixed stylistic categories, moving fluidly between Surrealism and Abstraction, both of which she found fundamentally intertwined: ‘Abstract art and Surrealism were the two movements that interested me most, and I see nothing incompatible in that, indeed we all walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other surreal – it is point and counterpoint.’ Whether dancing on the rooftops in Paris, sharing ideas with Pablo Picasso, or gathering starfish on the beaches of Cornwall, Eileen Agar transformed the everyday into an otherworldly beauty. Outside of her legacy as a pioneering figure in the Surrealist movement, which is firmly established, her identity as a singular artist continues to grow, and this exhibition seeks to show how she evolved beyond Surrealism per se, redefining the world around her through imaginative power. This exhibition brings together paintings, collages, and mixed-media works spanning almost 30 years of Agar’s career (1957–1985). The show explores her lifelong engagement with nature, Surrealism, and Abstraction, revealing the experimentation and freedom that defined her practice. Transformation is a key theme, a recurring idea throughout Agar’s work, ordinary things becoming strange, poetic, and alive through imagination. As her friend, writer Andrew Lambirth observed, her work ‘is not the spontaneous outpouring of the surrealist unconscious, but a very conscious and highly structured process. It is the Agar way.’ Play, intuition, and imaginative freedom remained fundamental to Agar’s practice. As she reflected in 1988, ‘Life’s meaning is lost without the spirit of play. In play all that is lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find expression.’ A significant focus within the exhibition is Agar’s fascination with nature. Following the Second World War, Agar described herself as emerging from a period of ‘physical and spiritual famine.’ Journeys to Cornwall and the Lake District helped replenish what she described as a depleted imagination, and her post-war works reveal a cautious optimism through softer, pastel palettes, layered surfaces, and stencilled forms that gesture towards renewal after years of austerity. Collage occupied a central role in Agar’s thinking and methodology, functioning as a conceptual framework even within her paintings, where forms dissolve, overlap, and reassemble in rhythmic, organic compositions. Works from the 1960s onwards demonstrate Agar’s increasingly experimental painterly language, particularly following her embrace of acrylic paint. Introduced to the medium in 1965, acrylic allowed her to combine impasto, washes, and sharply defined forms within increasingly ambitious compositions. Her paintings from the 1970s and 1980s combine translucent colour, geometric patterns, and recurring motifs—including shells, birds, hands, flowers, and silhouetted figures—revealing her continuous spirit of experimentation well into her eighties. One room of the exhibition focuses on 1985, when Agar returned to photographs she had taken nearly fifty years earlier in Ploumanach, Brittany, famous for surreal pink granite boulders along the coastline — bizarre rock shapes sculpted over millions of years by wind and sea. From these images, Agar created a series of hallucinatory paintings in which the coastal rock formations re-emerge as looming, anthropomorphised presences resembling animals, mushrooms, or faces. Reinterpreting the earlier images through paint with bold colour and shifting perspective, the ‘Rock’ series became a remarkable late expression of Agar’s surrealist imagination, reconnecting memory, nature, and the unconscious across decades of artistic practice. In recent years, Agar’s work has been included in international institutional shows, including The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, the international exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021), which travelled to the Tate Modern, London. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Tate, London; the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Portrait Gallery, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, among others. This exhibition runs parallel to Leaves of the World at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.