Necessary Bandages

Details

Emmy Bridgwater (1906-1999)
Necessary Bandages
signed 'Emmy Bridgwater' (lower right)
oil on panel
13¾ x 11½ in. (35 x 29.2 cm.)
Painted circa 1942.
There is a surrealist composition on the reverse.

Provenance

with Blond Fine Art, London.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, British Surrealism, London, Blond Fine Art, 1989, p. 10, illustrated.

Exhibited

probably, London, Blond Fine Art, British Women Surrealists: Eileen Agar, Emmy Bridgwater, Ithell Colquhoun, Grace Pailthorpe, Edith Rimmington: an exhibition arranged in conjunction with the publication of Thames and Hudson of 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement' by Whitney Chadwick, October - November 1985, no. 19 as 'Search for a fading prospect'.
London, Blond Fine Art, British Surrealism, June 1989, no. 8.
Aldeburgh, Peter Pears Gallery, Festival Exhibition, June 2006, no. 36.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

Emmy Bridgwater was born in Birmingham and studied art there, and in Oxford and London. In 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, deeply shaped the future of her work. Soon after she joined the Birmingham Group of Surrealists and then the Surrealist group in England in 1940. Bridgwater contributed to several International Surrealist publications and in 1947 was cordially guested to the Galerie Maeght International Surrealist show in Paris where she signed the English group's 'Declaration'. Michel Remy writes of Bridgwater writes, 'Her works are places of metamorphoses, embedded within processes of birth and death, as if matter delivered itself, leading back to origins - moments of mourning, too, in a womb-like space' (private correspondence, 28 August 2006).

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