EILEEN AGAR

“My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting.”

Throughout her career Eileen Agar maintained a tenuous relationship with surrealism, taking cues from concurrent movements like cubism, and abstraction, while simultaneously interjecting a consistent irreverence and wit. The result was a deeply personal artistic language that linked diverse forms and objects through both spiritual, and formal relationships, as well as her own autobiography. Including works made between 1927 and 1980, Leaves of the World underscores the enduring importance of collage to her work, not only as a technique, but a way of synthesizing the kaleidoscopic references, and ongoing conversations with artists and writers that informed her work. This includes Agar’s relationship with the painter Paul Nash, whom she met in the coastal town of Swanage in the mid-1930s, which led to life-long fascination with the found object, as well as the ecology of the sea. Rich hues of blue would begin to dominate her palette, as evidenced by Leaves of the World, c. 1940, where an interplay of transparent layers and bold swaths of paint create a vortex-like form, revealing delicate branches at its center.

While the second world war had a profound impact on Agar’s practice, devoting her energy to the war effort in spite of her pacifist stance, she approached her work with a renewed vigor at the end of the 1940s. Paint became increasingly alchemical, as she experimented with poured enamel, and introduced geometric forms that both defined figurative elements and created windows into the complex architecture of her compositions, like the torqued silhouettes of Personnage, 1949. Her move to West London in 1958 enabled Agar to translate these visual strategies to a new scale. In both Deus ex Machina, 1963-1965, and Medusa, 1965, Agar creates an array of planes within the image, interjecting a vernacular of recurring motifs of flowers, curves, and shell-like forms, and abstract references to her interest in Greek theater and mythology. This process of layering visual fields would be furthered with the introduction of acrylic paints to her practice in the late 1960s, like the zig-zagging lines, and bold swirls that comprise La Fleur, 1972. Agar would continue to experiment freely with material throughout her life, but it was this persistent curiosity and sense of artistic freedom that unites her work, stating, “to play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic. In play the mind is prepared to accept the unimagined and incredible, to enter a world where different laws apply, to be free, unfettered and divine.”

Born in Buenos Aires to a Scottish father and American mother, Eileen Agar relocated to London as a child, first studying art at the Brook Green School, and later, the Slade School of Fine Art. Joining the London Group in 1934, Agar would rise to prominence as one of the few women to exhibit in The International Surrealist Exhibition, presented in 1936 at New Burlington Galleries, London. That same year, Agar’s work would be included in the landmark exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, furthering her international reputation. In 2021, the Whitechapel Gallery, London presented Angel of Anarchy, the first major posthumous retrospective of Agar’s work comprising over 150 works, curated by Laura Smith, which later traveled to Mjellby Art Museum, Sweden, and Leeds Art Gallery. Her work has been included in ​​the recent exhibitions Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum and Marta Papini, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, 2025, Surrealism, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024, Judy Chicago: Herstory, The New Museum, New York, 2023, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecelia Alemani, the international exhibition at 59th Venice Biennale, 2022, Surrealism Beyond Borders, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021, traveled to the Tate Modern, London. Thames & Hudson re-published Eileen Agar’s groundbreaking autobiography, A Look at My Life in 2024. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Tate, London, the British Museum, London, National Portrait Gallery, London, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, among others.

Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery.