Announcing Co-Representation of Eileen Agar
Alison Jacques will present work by Eileen Agar at Art Basel 2025, Ground Floor, Stand A4, 19-22 June 2025
June 2025
Eileen Agar, Two Worlds, 1969 Two Worlds, 1969
Alison Jacques announces co-representation of the Eileen Agar Estate with Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. A pioneer of surrealism both in Britain and internationally, as a painter and object maker Eileen Agar (b.1899, Buenos Aires; d.1991, London) paved a profoundly individual path for her life and work. Her art resisted formal stylistic labels. Instead, her ‘highly personal combinations of form and content’ reflected 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 pivotal 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).
Agar’s introduction to surrealist thought in Paris, where she engaged with the artistic and intellectual luminaries of her time, including André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Paul Éluard among others, predated the movement’s introduction to audiences in the UK. On her return to England in the early 1930s, Agar painted her first surrealist painting, and soon made her first collage. A stay in Dorset spawned a further artistic breakthrough; she began to incorporate found objects in her art. Beachcombing became a vital part of her sculptural practice. She transformed ordinary things – fishing nets, seashells, diamanté beads, coral – into extraordinary objects. Her assemblages and sculptures took on many forms, including ceremonial hats, totems, and boxes. As she later reflected: ‘my life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting’.
After World War II, 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.
Acknowledgement for Agar’s work has grown in the years following her death. Her major survey, Angel of Anarchy at Whitechapel Gallery, London, curated by Laura Smith in 2021, toured to Leeds Art Gallery, and internationally, to Mjellby Art Museum, Halmstad, Sweden. Significant recent museum shows which have exhibited Agar’s work include Surréalisme, Centre Pompidou (2024), Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, The Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2024). Agar’s work has been acquired by major museums including Tate; Victoria & Albert Museum; British Museum; Courtauld Institute of Art; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Galleries of Scotland; The Hepworth Wakefield; Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Alison Jacques will present work by Eileen Agar at Art Basel 2025, Ground Floor, Stand A4 (19-22 June 2025).