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Artist or Maker: Eileen Agar (1904-1991)

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Description: Oval Object
signed 'AGAR' (lower right), signed again, inscribed and dated 'EILEEN AGAR/OVAL OBJECT/1953' (on a label attached to the backboard)
oil and pastel on board
30 x 38 1/2 in. (76 x 96.5 cm.)

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Provenance: Private collection, UK.

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Exhibited: London, Tate Britain, London Group Jubilee Exhibition, July - August 1964, no. 79.
Southampton, Southampton Art Gallery, no. 48, catalogue not traced.

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Notes: Although Eileen Agar had drifted away from the Surrealist group at the beginning of the war, she nonetheless remained faithful to her earlier commitments, never leaving the independence of mind and creativity she had developed within the group. The present work is perfectly surrealist in the sense it presents us with an inexhaustibly creative duality in its superimposition of simple geometric shapes and echoes of organic and vegetal, if not anatomical, reality. This results in a singular proliferation of possible meanings, in close keeping with the oval form, that of an egg, an ovum, pregnant with emerging plural shapes, and also that of an eye - whose pupil reflects not only the richness and ambivalence of external forms, but also the fertility of the inner world.

We are very grateful to Michel Remy for providing the above catalogue entry and the entries for lots 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 80, 83, 91, 92, 97.

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