Eileen Agar was an important figure in ensuring the expansion of the surrealist movement of Paris a Britain during the 1930s.
She was the only British woman represented in the groundbreaking Surrealist International Exhibition in the 1936 London, a show that assured him fame and that showed a style that united the surrealists' emphasis on visualizing the subconscious with an exceptionally English aristocratic style. kind of eccentricity.
Eileen Agar, like many female artists, she has sometimes defined herself by the male company she kept rather than your own creative productionHowever, his biography is a fascinating story only sprinkled with masculine references and that is a great and good fusion of modern art and literature.
Source: El País
But she was, in fact, one of the most adventurous and influential artists of the Surrealist movement in Britain, working with a prolific energy that sustained her until the late eighties.
Eileen was born into a wealthy British family, her mother was the heiress to a biscuit company, and her father was the manager of a successful windmill and irrigation systems company, cross agar. It was his business that led the family to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Hagar spent her early years.
Growing up, she explained her childhood as a privileged and eccentric one, "full of balloons, hoops and Saint Bernard dogs," and claimed that whenever the family traveled back to Great Britain, his mother insisted on bringing a cow for milk and an orchestra so they could be surrounded by music.
At the age of six, Eileen was sent to England to attend a boarding school, where a teacher recognized and encouraged her artistic potential. When the World War I in 1914, she was briefly sent to attend an institution located in a more rural area, before being transferred again to Paris, to attend secondary school.
After graduating and making life in Paris, Agar was part of a small but notable group of women linked to the surrealist movement, which also included, among British artists, the painter Ithell Colquhoun, the writer and artist Leonora Carrington and the interpreter Sheila Legge. Such artists were able to use the Surrealist emphasis on imaginative freedom to imagine worlds where gender boundaries were fluid and where the realities of patriarchal society were applied less rigorously.
Hagar's practice was diverse, moving freely through the painting, photography, collage and sculpture, but it was united by an emphasis on the germinal power of the imagination and by a love of natural and organic forms.
Eileen helped shape the development of surrealism in Britain, a contribution made all the more impressive by the fact that she was one of the few women associated with movement.
His work continues to be exhibited in galleries around the world, while the impact of his aesthetic can also be seen in the work of contemporary artists crafting their own versions of Surrealism, such as Beth Hoeckel, Frank Moth y Charles Wilkin.
Agar's influence is evident in the fashion world as well, with some of today's leading designers drawing on the cue of surrealism to create clothing from solid materials and found objects.
his memories, A Look at My Life (1988), published shortly before his death, provided a vivid glimpse of the lost bohemian enclaves of Paris y London before the war, and ensured that Agar's work would continue to be discussed and exhibited after her death.