SALON, in collaboration with Mallett and Dreweatts 1759, presents Dancing with Colour, a selling exhibition of paintings by the British artist Berenice Sydney (1944 – 1983).
This show, remarkably the first presentation of her work staged at a major public art gallery in over thirty years, is comprised of a selection of oil paintings and works on paper that reflects Berenice’s – as she was professionally known – signature lyrical and highly animated graphic style. Her paintings, notable for their fluency of form and movement, are inscribed with her passion for music and dance – she studied classical ballet, guitar and flamenco – as well as the sense of liberation and freedom of expression which prevailed in Britain during the 1960s.
Paintings such as Untitled (1966), and Lady Enjoying the Sun (On the Beach) (1966) (illustrated right), both of which are featured in Dancing with Colour, are typical of her work, in that they reflect the influence of cubist and fauvist vocabularies that were central to Berenice’s practice, in contrast to the then-prevailing Pop Art aesthetic.
Although she died shortly before her thirty-ninth birthday, her work was widely shown in Britain and abroad in her lifetime and is held in over 100 important private and public collections; these include the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate and the Smithsonian, Washington D.C.
Of her first solo show at the Drian Galleries in London in 1968, the critic Marina Vaizey in Arts Review praised Berenice’s drawings based on Greek myths as ‘neo-classical in technique and vaguely reminiscent of the famous period of Picasso, arguing ‘a tough self-training’ and as being ‘coherent and elegant exercises.’
One of the most expressive and original artists working in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Berenice’s oeuvre spans paintings, drawings, prints, children’s books, costume design and performance. She travelled widely throughout her life, including to Greece, the Aegean islands and Egypt; the history and mythology of which provided subject matter for many of her paintings.
She continued to explore themes in her work relating to Persian mythology, Christian symbolism and Greek mythological subjects as well as referencing Ancient Egyptian art, creating a hieroglyph of her professional name and working on papyrus.
As her style developed, Berenice abandoned figurative representation for total abstraction, in which geometric or freely composed forms created rhythmic and harmonious compositions. The multifaceted experiments of this nature have been described as depicting her own ‘floating cosmos’. As is witnessed in another featured painting, Untitled (1983), (illustrated right) the vortex-like compositions of these later works generate a dynamic structural frame that expresses joy, exhilaration and the artist’s extraordinary freedom of spirit.
| Duration | 23 June 2018 - 08 July 2018 |
| Times | 10am-6pm, 7 days a week, last entry 5:30pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Saatchi Gallery |
| Address | The Duke of York’s Headquarters, Kings Road, London, SW3 4RY |
| Contact | 0207 811 308 / admin@saatchigallery.com / www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk |