Towner Eastbourne remembers "overlooked" 20th century artist

Paule Vézelay Living Lines runs until August 31.

Vézelay (1892-1984) was responsible for an output encompassing painting, collage, sculpture, constructions, illustration, textiles and photography. Living Lines offers an unprecedented insight into her accomplished seven-decade career, featuring more than sixty works from private and public collections.

Seeking to reinstate the artist’s place within the history of British and European Modernism, the exhibition will reveal how she became a prominent figure within the European avant-garde, working alongside some of the most significant artists of pre-war Paris including Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, Marlow Moss, Wassily Kandinsky and André Masson.

As well as bringing together examples of Vézelay’s best-known paintings and sculptures such as Object in Three Dimensions (1935) and Construction. Grey Lines on Pink Ground (1938) from the Tate Collection, the exhibition will feature several works which have not been publicly exhibited before, including Composition Objects and Sun (1930) and Eight Curved Forms and Two Circles (1946).

Towner director and CEO Joe Hill said: “Paule Vézelay is an artist I think that a lot of people would think has been overlooked in British history. She's actually a British-artist born artist originally, but moved to Paris and changed her name to Paule Vézelay to sit in and work alongside, certainly in the early part of the 20th century and in the interwar period, some of the great names of the art movements and design movements in Paris. I think she's a really exciting early 20th-century British artist who worked across print, textiles and painting. Some would describe her as one of the first abstract British painters. I think a lot of designers and people will be really interested in her work. It's very, very beautiful and ranges across lots of different mediums. So it's a really nice complement to Sussex Modernism (which is also running at Towner Eastbourne).

“We were working with a curator who was very interested in her and brought her back to our attention. And we thought our audience would just love this work. Towner has always had this reputation for showcasing people that maybe have been overlooked. And this is an opportunity to give her a moment.”