joseph scissorhands: July 2026

Saturday, 4 July 2026

Eileen Agar

Eileen Agar - The Sleep Walkers, 1979-81

"My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting."
– Eileen Agar, 1988

Eileen Agar - Glove Hat, 1936

Surrealism has been much on my mind of late having visited the Leonora Carrington exhibition in Paris (here), and Schiaparelli: Art is Fashion exhibition (to be featured in a future post), at the V&A Museum again. In that last exhibition is one of Eileen Agar's surreal hat designs (above). Agar would most certainly have made the acquaintance of both Carrington and Schiaparelli as they all moved in the small circle of Surrealists active in Paris in the 1930s. This exhibition takes place across town on Cork Street and features a series of Agar's paintings and collages. Agar was known for showing at the Redfern Gallery further along Cork Street (here), but that gallery appears to be undergoing refurbishment or has sadly closed entirely as Alison Jacques now controls Agar's estate. Nonetheless I really enjoyed this small show of Agar's works created over a 30 year period especially the works in the first gallery space here, some of which although painted appear to be of elements stencilled and collaged together. This is all part of Agar's personal artistic language in which she combined surrealism abstraction and to a lesser extent figuration. ‘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,’ she states. Less is made of Agar's skills as a colourist and the interesting tensions of contrasting vivid and sombre elements in the colour palette within her works. Nature features strongly in her imagery as she drew inspiration directly from whichever environment she happened to be in. Elements such as flowers shells, birds and facial profiles from landscapes as diverse as Cornwall, Tenerife and the Lake District can all be found in these vibrant paintings. Less successful in my opinion were the later works from 1985 in the back gallery known as the 'Rock' series taken from photographs of her visits to Ploumanac’h, Brittany. This is a landscape made famous for its wind sculpted pink granite rock formations along the coastline. They are a range of strongly sculptural, amorphous objects resembling figures, animals and faces. They are fairly representational, and the technique and colours in which they are executed didn't really move me as much as the earlier pieces where Agar lets her creativity, memory and imagination dictate the imagery.