Eileen Agar: Flowering of a Wing, Works: 1936–1989

Following the uproar induced by the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, British artist Eileen Agar, whose work had been included in the show, traveled to Ploumanac’h in Brittany for a rest. Mesmerized by the dramatic rock formations lining the coast, she purchased a Rolleiflex camera and created a series of photographs that evinced her belief in the formation of the surreal by nature. Three of these photos are included in Eileen Agar: Flowering of a Wing, Works: 1936–1989, a small but lively survey that spans fifty years of the artist’s work in photography, painting, collage, and drawing at Andrew Kreps. In Rock 1 (1936) enormous boulders, rounded into abstract forms by wind and sea, stand stacked one on top of another. In Rock 3 (1936), sunlight falling on an enormous slab of pitted limestone reveals a latticework pattern while Rock 4 (1936) shows an enormous boulder balanced atop a second, the drama of its precarity heightened by the deep shadow of its underside. Striking while also contemplative, these are among the images that would embed themselves in Agar’s psyche, their harmonizing of abstraction with the surreal sparking inspiration throughout the ensuing decades of her artmaking practice.

Created adjacent to the absolutism of Abstract Expressionism that artists like Pollock and Rothko embraced across the pond, Agar’s large painting Portrait (ca. 1949) easily handles figuration alongside the visible tracks of the artist’s application of paint. Amid thick swirls of black, midnight, and violet oil that run and puddle across the surface of a board, a face much like Agar’s emerges in yellow and pink. Two long-lashed eyes are adorned with an overdrawn lavender spiral, while the figure’s slender nose and pouty lips are merely suggested in an underlayer of navy, red, and green flecks. Lean in for a close look at the chaos of splatters and drips and the image of the face becomes even more prominent, its wide-eyed expression and dainty features insisting attention.

Agar’s work was unfamiliar to me before seeing the show, and I was overwhelmed by a presence I can only categorize as joy that filled the gallery space. The artist revels in a deeply saturated palette of cyan and green, punched up with orangey reds, sunny yellows, and soft pinks. Black is used to punctuate, but rarely intrudes on mood. A large oil painting on canvas, Sun Flower (1953) features a blue sky stretching over a green coast and purple sea into which a floral shape appears to have been cut, revealing a kaleidoscope of cobalt, orange, pink, and red beneath. A star, a spiral, and the figure of a woman painted at the bottom of the canvas echo the illusion of cutting away foreground to reveal a great vibrancy hidden behind, while blocks of mauve and olive found at the edges of the painting suggest a third space floating between the two planes. The unresolved suggestion of depth disorients and mesmerizes. Perhaps there is a hint of the spiritual dwelling within the abstract forms, a pristine intention in their articulation that feels very much akin to the paintings of Hilma af Klint. In Flowering of a Wing (1966), the titular work of the show, Agar works oil and acrylic paints into a thick impasto of bumps and blotches. A figure with a yellow and green heart-shaped face peers at the viewer through a floral-shaped mask into which a teardrop—or wing—has been cut. Geometric patterns and stripes make up the figure’s body while bands of cobalt, cyan, turquoise, and sage build into a background that maintains the uncertainty of place seen in Sun Flower. “Where is here?” and “What lies in front and behind?” are questions Agar leaves floating.

A small untitled and undated work of pastel and collage on paper, easily missed among Agar’s larger offerings, was worth lingering over. A layer of pale blue paper into which a tentacled organic shape—a butterfly? A fish?—has been cut reveals a second layer frottaged in red, yellow, and midnight blue. A row of embossed paper scraps colored red and navy runs along the top of the composition. There is a playfulness to this small construction, a cheeriness in Agar’s employment of paper, scissors, and crayon and her careful arrangement of elements in the frame that I found quietly endearing.

The exhibition concludes on the lower level of the gallery, where four small works on canvas made in 1985, some fifty years after Agar’s journey to Ploumanac’h, show the same rock formations found in the photographs of 1936. Meticulous studies, the boulders in these works nevertheless take on a fuller surrealistic destiny; most are fitted with eyes and mouths, their forms twisting to converse or devour. Short, horizontal brush strokes of blue, green, and purple become backgrounds of tranquil seas and sun drenched skies as Agar folds time over on itself, returning to a moment when everything her future would hold could be found on a windswept coast.