The exhibition Fertile Spoon will bring together the work of Grace Pailthorpe (1883-1971), Surrealist painter, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, with that of contemporary painter Mary Stephenson (b. 1989), student at the Royal Academy Schools, London.

Pailthorpe and Stephenson: two British artists living a century apart, remarking on the unruly depths of human psychology, and representing it through a world of surreal fantasy.  Marking fifty years since Pailthorpe’s death,  the exhibition will comprise paintings and works on paper by both artists, including July, 1948 (1948) by Pailthorpe that has never previously been publicly exhibited. What emerges from the artists’ shared exploration of the unconscious is a surreal dialogue formed in the logic of dreams and emotion, which asks that we look anew at the submerged recesses of the mind.

Playful, satiric, and mostly disordered, Mary Stephenson’s work is concerned with the way that the unconscious colours the waking world: distorting, concealing and revealing physical reality. The audience encounters a range of ideas mined from the artist’s unconscious; inner desires, childhood regressions and the formation of an ‘ideal self’. Depicting the transition of thoughts and emotions in psychological spaces, her works emerge from the depths of the unconscious mind and culminate in comprehension at the surface level. Stephenson’s imagination induces a state of self-reflection in the spectator, asking them to look beneath the constructed self to the surreal reality below.

Grace Pailthorpe was trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the 1920s, but her artistic inquiry into representing the unconscious began in 1935 when she met Reuben Mednikoff, the artist who would become her life-long collaborator and partner. Pailthorpe’s works reflect a lifelong commitment to psychoanalysis; painting what lurks deep in the unconscious, often revealing disturbing visions of uterine anxieties. She stands as a controversial figure in the history of Surrealism, and would be expelled from the group in 1940 for her refusal to heed the group’s doctrine. Fascinated by the therapeutic power of art, her understanding of Surrealism was deeply informed by her psychoanalytic knowledge, and resulted in a process which the artist termed ‘psychorealism’, in which works were automatically produced and then analysed.  Depicting organic matter; bodily fluids, umbilical cords and infantile fantasies, such as in the work titled June 3, 1938-4 (1938), Pailthorpe’s paintings are located within the biological and psychological processes of life and humanity.

Curated with Chloe Nahum.

Grace Pailthorpe works courtesy of Austin/Desmond Fine Art and James Birch.

Thanks to John Austin, James Birch, Richard Pailthorpe and Monty Renshaw for their help and support with this exhibition.

Art UK