Art, Identity, Migration: Ben Uri at the 2023 London Art Fair
Forthcoming exhibition
Untitled (Vorticist Figures), c. 1911-12
oil on canvas
45.8 x 81.4 cm
(lower left): 'CB' [date illegible]
2008-4
© Clare Winsten estate
Photo: Bridgeman images
Although less finely executed than its more finished companion piece, Untitled Figure Study (1912, oil on board, Liss Fine Art), this composition with its bold palette and flattened, pared down...
Although less finely executed than its more finished companion piece, Untitled Figure Study (1912, oil on board, Liss Fine Art), this composition with its bold palette and flattened, pared down figures, undoubtedly dates to Winsten's later period at the Slade School of Fine Art (1910-12) and a period of modernist experimentation in her work, signalling her rapid modernist trajectory in this period. The trianglular heads and crossed limbs contained within a rudimentary hand-drawn grid relate not only to her more finished work (Liss Fine Art) but that of her contemporaneous student David Bomberg, who also used the device of figures emerging from a grid several times in contemporaneous works including 'Island of Joy' (c. 1912), 'Vision of Ezekiel' (1912), and, most famously, 'The Mud Bath (1914, Tate). The two artists knew each other as students at the Slade and Bomberg included her work in the 'Jewish Section' of the exhibition 'Twentieth-century Art: A Review of Modern Movements' at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914, although she also showed work outside this section. Winsten reworked the motif of severely simplified, actively engaged or struggling forms in several increasingly complex contemporaneous exhibitions before later abandoning these early experiments and turning first to more figurative, and then in her last years, more abstract forms.
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