Eileen Agar

Alison Jacques presents an exhibition of Eileen Agar (b.1899, Buenos Aires; d.1991, London),  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.

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.’

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