Paule Vézelay: Living Lines

About

This spring, the first major exhibition of Paule Vézelay's work in over 40 years will tour to Towner, after its 2025 debut at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol. Paule Vézelay (1892-1984) was one of the UK's first abstract artists, responsible for an extraordinary output encompassing painting, collage, sculpture, constructions, illustration, textiles and photography. Living Lines offers an unprecedented insight into her accomplished seven-decade career, featuring over sixty works from private and public collections. Seeking to rightly afford 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). Paule Vézelay, Silhouettes, 1938. Photo England & Co Estate of Paule Vézelay Growing Forms (1946), Paule Vézelay. Collection of Heloisa Genish; courtesy Heloisa Genish the Estate of Paule Vézelay. Paule Vézelay in her London studio with her 1955 textile Harmony (left) and her 1956 painting The Yellow Circle (right), photograph, Estate of Paule Vézelay.