JOAN EARDLEY: TIME A MAJOR EXHIBITION WAS HELD

JOAN EARDLEY: TIME A MAJOR EXHIBITION WAS HELD

This is a summary of an article by Libby Brooks in The Guardian newspaper which was published on 26^th May 2020

Joan Eardley: Time a major exhibition was held

Joan Eardley’s recognition internationally was stalled by her death from breast cancer at the age of 42.  Family, friends and admirers are calling for a major exhibition as the centenary of her birth approaches.  At this challenging time for art galleries due to the COVID 19 pandemic, another particular challenge is to honour Joan Eardley in the autumn of 2021. 

The art historian Frances Spalding is quoted, referring to Joan Eardley’s ‘immersive experience of just vast waste and vast seas and vast areas of cliff at Catterline, a small village on the Kincardineshire coast’.  Frances Spalding also refers to Joan Eardley’s work done at Townhead, Glasgow.  Joan Eardley’s paintings of children in Townhead are widely celebrated.  At Catterline Joan Eardley ‘created her elemental panoramas of land and sea in thickly textured paint’.

Joan Eardley died in 1963: she had been too ill to attend her first solo exhibition in London that year.

GILLIAN WISE: OBITUARY

GILLIAN WISE: OBITUARY

This is a summary of the obituary by Charles Darwent that was published in the Guardian newspaper of 9^th May 2020.

Gillian Wise

The British artist Gillian Wise was born on 16^th February 1936 and died on 11^th April 2020.  She worked in geometric abstraction.

Her style was based in the ‘Soviet model of art-making’.  Wise graduated from the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in the early 1960s.  In 1961 she became the youngest member of the British constructivists – the group that had been founded by Victor Pasmore in the early 1950s.  But by this time, Darwent writes, ‘the idea of a geometric abstraction that was in some way political – and, more specifically, aligned to the left – had come to be seen as both out of date and faintly dangerous.  Like others of the group, Wise was taken up by Drian, a gallery founded by a Lithuanian refugee, Halima Nalecz, to show work spurned by blue-chip dealers of Mayfair’.

In 1963 Wise exhibited with Anthony Hill in a show called Reliefs / Structures at the ICA in London.  ‘Metal Relief with Horizontal Elements (1962)’ is a work by Wise and Hill which is now in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.  In 1969, Hill won a British Council scholarship to research the history of Russian constructivism in the USSR: she studied in Leningrad.  Also in 1969, Hill exhibited in Helsinki in a show organised by the British abstractionist Jeffrey Steele.  Hill then left the constructivists to be a founder member of the Systems group.  Hill’s most successful years then followed, with definitive Systems group exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and at the Polytechnic of Central London.  Darwent writes: ‘The group fell apart in 1975 on disagreements over its position on Marxism’.

In 1979 Wise was commissioned to produce a work for a stairwell at Cinema 1 at the Barbican Centre, London.  This work – ‘The Alice Walls’ – was in place for the building’s opening in 1982.  Wise was mystified as to why she should have been given the commission.  In an interview of 2017 she said: “It was certainly contrary to the prevailing prejudice of the art establishment”.  Wise received no acknowledgement for the work and was not invited to the opening of the building.

After ‘The Alice Walls’, Wise left Britain and lived in the USA and then Paris where she had a precarious existence.   In 2014 a plaque was placed at ‘The Alice Walls’, naming Gillian Wise as its maker.