Gallery artists Mandy Bonnell and Carolyn Thompson have been chosen as semi-finalists in the Minnesota Center for Book Arts Prize 2020. You can vote for Mandy or Carolyn in the People’s Book Art Award until 10 January 2021 here: https://mcbaprize.org/2020-mcba-prize-peoples-book-art-award/
Recent sculpture by Denise de Cordova is featured in Rapt Beauty Wrapped, a group exhibition at Jaggedart, London (5 – 24 December). An illustrated catalogue 2020 of De Cordova’s carvings can be found on her Artist’s page on www.emmahilleagle.com
Over the past few weeks I have been inspired by a number of the artists that the Eagle Gallery represents who work in jobs that involve vulnerable children, or students who are struggling to finish degrees online. It takes creativity and sensitivity to re-think how to deliver workshops for children in tower blocks who do not have computers, or reassure young people who are making major readjustments at such a critical moment in their lives, and I am enormously impressed by how hard people are working to try to alleviate the situation for others.
Harriet Mena Hill has been working with #2Inspireyouth, funded by Notting Hill Genesis, to offer a young people’s art club on the Aylesbury Estate at the Elephant and Castle and has recently secured funding from the Notting Hill Wellbeing Fund to develop a series of remote workshops to bring together elderly residents and children on the Aylesbury. These will record memories of being housed there in the 1960s when the estate offered the most advanced kind of social housing and what it is like to be removed from the community in the current day, as the area undergoes massive private re-development. Hill’s work on the Aylesbury over the past two years has led her to make a series of ‘soft concrete’ works using felting techniques, which transform details of the brutalist architecture into images of surprising beauty. A series of her Perpetual Drawings (2020), has recently been selected for the Derwent Art Prize.
Artists have responded with invention and generosity in different ways, with many posting works for under £200 on Instagram’s #artistsupportpledge. By pledging to buy another artist’s work if sales reach £1000, the scheme enables artists to support each other financially. Eagle Gallery artists whose work you can see on #artistsupportpledge include: @mandy.bonnell, @jmsfsher, @_danroach_, @_carolynthompson_.
Denise de Cordova has turned her mind to a literary quiz based on her re-reading of novels. If you can name the authors of the book titles painted in two of her watercolours you can win them @denisedecordova1. De Cordova’s work is featured in a delightful short film Congregation by Jonas Grimas, which was shot during the opening of her solo exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge in 2013. The film can be viewed by visiting: https://vimeo.com/405892833
Hormazd Narielwalla’s recent series of mixed media collages Rock, Paper, Scissors, is a tribute to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Using the pages of a vintage pattern manual, Narielwalla plays with notions of two and three dimensional space in a subtle colour palette that brings to mind stone, marble and sky. The gallery will be launching a limited edition artist’s book based on the project and you can see the work at: http://www.narielwalla.com/Hormazd-Narielwalla-Rock-Paper-Scissors.pdf
The Gallery’s work on behalf of artists is critical during this time and I am delighted to announce that we have recently placed significant work by Jane Joseph and Natalie Dower in the collections of the British Museum, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art and TATE.
The Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum has acquired Joseph’s etching suite
If This is a Man, commissioned in 1999 by the Folio Society for their reprinting of Primo Levi’s seminal book about the holocaust.
The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art has selected three works by Dower to join their permanent collection of Systems and Constructivist art in Norwich. Chosen from across her 50-year career Dower will be represented by an early wall relief, a sculpture from the 1980s and a recent Square Root Spirals canvas from 2015
TATE has recently acquired an early painting by Dower of the artist Patrick George. The two were great friends and sat for reciprocal portraits in the late 1950s. Dower’s work will join George’s in a hang at TATE Britain.
Carolyn Thompson’s solo exhibition Post Moderns runs at the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall, York from 8th September to 4th October 2019. This recent body of work originates from the 50 texts found in the Penguin Modern Box Set, and will be shown at the Eagle Gallery in early 2020. https://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/
After Parker – Buttercup, daffodil, lily, hyacinth, freesia, forsythia, rose (page 1 of 2), 2019After Pessoa – I was not the only corpse, 2019
We are delighted to announce that Harriet Mena Hill has been shortlisted for The John Ruskin Prize: Agent of Change 2019. Among a strong selection of works, three of Hill’s recent Soft Concrete images will be shown at The Holden Gallery, Manchester (12 July – 24 August 2019). Soft Concrete is an on-going project that seeks to challenge the perception of so called ‘sink’ housing estates.
A number of our represented and associated artists are currently exhibiting in the RA Summer Exhibition. Works selected include Denise de Cordova’s sculpture Carrying the Hot Blur,James Fisher’s canvas Isabella Bird, two large paintings on paper by Peter Rasmussen and recent oils on panel by Trevor Sutton.
Fionna Murray’s solo exhibition Metropolitan Pastoral runs at the Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo, from 26 June – 16 July, 2019. The recent paintings are images developed from her exhibition at the Eagle in 2016 which was a response to Antonioni’s iconic film Blow Up.
Forthcoming Exhibition: HARRY ADAMS: Victory Over the Sun 12 July–2 August, 2019 With the title taken from the crazed 1913 Futurist Opera for which Kazimir Malevich made his first Black Square painting, Harry Adams presents an exhibition of new paintings and prints that continue musings on apocalyptic romanticism. Fusing visions of the bucolic English landscape with meditative forays into near abstraction, these are paintings of the micro/macro world offering up material and formal beauty alongside gleeful allusions to existential torment.
Sun you bore the passions And scorched them with flaming beam We’ll yank a dusty coverlet over you Lock you up in a concrete house!
Julia Farrer will be exhibiting new print works at the London Original Print Fair with the ars,-tis,f. Germany collective, 25–28 April, Royal Academy of Arts, London
(Please contact the Eagle Gallery for invitations)
Denise de Cordova will be showing recent work in a solo exhibition at Standpoint Gallery, London.The Materiality of Mild Fear, Deep Wood Women and Women who Have Incidents with Animals, runs from 5–26 April, www.standpointlondon.co.uk
