Bosse and Baum

Eileen Agar & Emma Witter: 'Tender Resurrection'.

On view from 27th April - 11th May.

“To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic, and to give a lie to the inconvenient world of fact.” - Eileen Agar

Emma Witter's debut exhibition stitches British Surrealism of Eileen Agars works on paper with her contemporary biophilic sculpture, forming "Tender Resurrection." 

Eileen Agar referred to herself as a Surrealist artist with a lowercase ‘s’. She worked and exhibited alongside the likes of Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Max Ernst and Lee Miller, and became one of the few women featured in the iconic International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 in London.

Emma Witter cites Agar’s reverence for nature, use of found marine objects and unorthodox juxtapositions as a profound influence on her own work. Working predominantly with biomass salvaged from restaurants, butchers and the River Thames, Witter extracts a forgotten beauty and wonder from organic materials such as bone. 
This harks back to the idea of repair, as bone has been used widely as an industrial byproduct throughout history. Juxtaposed with Agar’s intimate, vibrant ruminations on femininity and the natural world, Witter’s sculptures imagine bodies as castles – a meditation on what new structures might be with the bricks and scaffolding we leave behind.

Detail of Emma Witter, Trade Bodies, 2023, bone, brass wire.

Detail of Eileen Agar, The Dancer, 1941, pencil, ink, watercolour and pastel.

Detail of Emma Witter, Unidentified Object 10, 2023, Found object, lithostrotion coral fossil.

Emma Witter, Unidentified Object 14, 2023 Found object, shells, brass wire, lithostrotion coral fossil.