SOME ROSES AND THEIR PHANTOMS | 30 APRIL - 4 MAY
PRIVATE VIEW and MEET THE ARTIST'S EVENT | 30 APRIL 6 - 9pm
VENUE | Bermondsey Project Space - London
Miranda Boulton’s work is an ongoing conversation between the past and the present
The series of paintings for this exhibition are a response to Dorothea Tanning’s painting ‘Some Roses and their Phantoms’ painted in 1952. Boulton spent months absorbing the painting into her memory, the insect- like form became a vibrant character in her mind. She then worked on a series of paintings on paper exploring her memories of this form, bringing it to life. There is an essence of the original, an acknowledgement of a time, place and history all in the mix. She explores new forms from old imagery and narratives, linked through expressive layers of colour, gesture and form.
Boulton is fascinated by Flower Paintings from Art History. She re-imagines a genre once seen as superficial, feminine and slight. Flowers make sense to her, they cover the monumental and the everyday, alive, beautiful, decaying, dying, haunting, life-affirming, poignant, reassuring, always at the height of their beauty they fade away.
‘These works are saturated with thinking about the genre and its canonical practitioners, and never just in the mode of reference, or of establishing herself within a lineage. Boulton treats artists of the past as living resources to push against and experiment with, as interlocutors and channels of intimacy. The constellations guiding her work are many. Edouard Manet Henri Fantin-Latour and Giorgio Morandi recur alongside Rachel Ruysch, Mary Moser, Winifred Nicholson and Dorothea Tanning to name but a few. By recalling these artists together, their references threading from one work to the next, Boulton creates an imagined cohort of artistic ancestors, and raises questions pertinent to feminist art history. Why is it that when male artists painted still life it was considered profound – in Morandi’s case, almost spiritually so – but when women engaged with the same subject matter they were judged narrow, minor, even amateur? In Boulton’s spirited conversations with tradition, which treat all her chosen artists as equally valuable source material, these gendered distinctions melt away. Boulton’s process ensures these influences never become overbearing.’
‘Flowers are stripped of their associations with conventional femininity, what for centuries connected the ornamental function and essential frailty of flowers with women’s bodies. Instead, these flowers are elastic, energetic and robust. Distortion strategies explode conventional verisimilitude, and produce stretched and melted bouquets, which threaten to engulf the entire canvas.’ Acts of Cross-Pollination: Miranda Boulton’s Still Life by Rebecca Birrell
Meandering around this genres history, she spends time absorbing artists and their work, following their brushstrokes as if listening in on a conversation.
The series of paintings for this exhibition are a response to Dorothea Tanning’s painting ‘Some Roses and their Phantoms’ painted in 1952. Boulton spent months absorbing the painting into her memory, the insect- like form became a vibrant character in her mind. She then worked on a series of paintings on paper exploring her memories of this form, bringing it to life. There is an essence of the original, an acknowledgement of a time, place and history all in the mix. She explores new forms from old imagery and narratives, linked through expressive layers of colour, gesture and form.
When preparing for the show Miranda wrote: I was surprised by my response to Dorothea Tanning’s painting ‘Some Roses and Their Phantoms’, 1952. I spent time with the painting, lodging it into my memory, the brown floral shapes with their tonal colour scheme and almost landscape-like division of the canvas by the tabletop.
Over the weeks, I would wake up in the morning aware that the Phantom character had sneaked into my dreams. Sometimes he took centre stage and sometimes he was floating in the shadows. I love the connection with my response to the painting and how the Surrealists were also deeply interested in interpreting dreams, searching for subconscious associations between images and their meanings. My dreams faded as the day went on, but the phantoms presence remained with me.
When I came to paint from memories of the painting it demanded to be centre stage, running freely through my series of works on paper and then subtly poked its head out in my large painting on canvas. For me it’s the protagonist of the painting and links the unsettling imagery with the subconscious.