A new exhibition at the Tate Britain showcases Ithell Colquhoun’s surreal and spiritual artwork alongside Edward Burra’s vibrant documentation of 20th-century Europe
BY LARA IQBAL GILLING, BY LARINA FERNANDES
Ithell Colquhoun was an English surrealist artist whose paintings explore unconscious and spiritual realms. Although she never labelled her own identity, her work studies queer ideas of gender and eroticism and she had intimate relationships with women.
Her varied body of work shows her interest in mysticism from the start – drawing inspiration from the Bible, Greek and Celtic mythology, Jewish mysticism, Hinduism and Buddhism.
Her early paintings from the 1920s feel 3D – sculpted cheeks and chins make people look as if they are made from clay (almost like today’s “filler face”). In fact, every element looks like it’s been pulled from the earth – greens, browns, and muted reds form a natural palette. Even peacocks are robbed of their flashy colours.
When Colquhoun travelled to Greece and fell in love with Andromaque Kazou, turquoise is introduced. Kazou’s portrait, however, is limited to black, white and brown, the most realistic in the exhibit.
Partially inspired by Dalí, Colquhoun painted a series of plants in the 1930s in a style she called “magical realism”. Plants and rocks take on human characteristics, shaped like genitalia and other body parts. Bodies and sex become part of the natural landscape, comfortingly mundane.
Colquhoun’s later series Sex Magic takes on a hallucinogenic quality. No longer confined to earthly inspiration, she uses fluorescent pink and rainbow shades. She explores “alchemical union”, where feminine and masculine energies interact to produce the “Divine Androgyne”, a flawless being which transcends gender. Homosexual desire and female pleasure are portrayed as avenues to enlightenment. The paintings are unboundaried: human becomes divine and sexuality becomes sacred.
As a practising occultist, she used unconscious ways of creating, including a technique called decalcomania which involves pressing paint between two pages. She then finished the paintings based on what she saw in the shapes.
The approach certainly fulfils the surrealist aim to disturb. The bulbous shapes in her 1947 watercolours evoke discomfort but are hard to look away from. They sit in an unrecognisable dreamscape of gorgeous sea colours, where you don’t know where you are or what you’re seeing.
Throughout this later work, there is a sense that Colquhoun is reaching into the beyond to reveal what is there – lifting a veil on an invisible reality. It feels less like creation and more like discovery.
Where Colquhoun accesses a world beyond reality, Edward Burra captures what’s in front of him. The exhibition contains 80 paintings from his travels across Spain, France, the US and England.
His dramatised, satirical style has both men and women wearing makeup and jewel tones. There is an energy and bustle about his early paintings, crowded with people in motion and conversation.
People from all corners of society are pictured – from railway workers to dancers. He captures scenes from racially integrated establishments during Jim Crow, and places with patrons of all sexualities. Dance is a unifying force, and Burra’s lifelong obsession with music is apparent. A jaunty jazz tune plays from Burra’s own record collection.
As he neared the end of his life in the 1970s, the curiosity and adventure in his earlier paintings dwindles. There are fewer people, and his final painting shows a misty Dartmoor landscape, where he didn’t stray far from the car.
The exhibition is in the Tate Britain until 19 October.
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