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[andreahamiltonblog]

Romany Eveleigh

Romany Eveleigh was one of the rarest of artists, as a minimal abstractionist who managed to stand out for her uncompromising minimal, text-based vocabulary.

Eveleigh’s most important bodies of work ‘Pages, 1972,’ was a series based on the relationship between language and the body. The repetition of cramped circles populating the Pages series, are emblematic of laborious, repetitive tasks – a contested surface of the feminine realm, as articulated by one of Italy's most important and original philosophers of the post war period, Giorgio Agamben.

The text-based works of the 1970s, exploded into abstracted versions of themselves in the 80s and 90s, with ‘skins’ of ink, paper, and paint on the canvases. The Febo series, 80 drawings made using her left hand, forced her body to go against its natural inclination, and marked her return to painting. Playing with illusion, she painted each work of the series to replicate lined copybook pages, and then executed painterly marks on top. 

The paintings which followed, specifically the large-scale paintings executed between 1993-1997, exhibit a restrained use of colour: monochromatic blocks fill the canvas field in sensual coating, reminiscent of the tightly coiled circles of the Pages of 20 years earlier.

Image 1: Romany Eveleigh, Pages, 1972, Tate

Image 2: Romany Eveleigh, Inland Series No. 5, 2016-2017, Gallery Bellemare Lambert

Image 3: Romany Eveleigh, TO, 2007, Gallery Bellemare Lambert

Image 4: Romany Eveleigh, Untitled, 2006, Gallery Bellemare Lambert