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Marion Elizabeth Adnams was born in Derby in 1898 where she remained, for the most part, until her death, aged ninety-six. During the course of her long life, she forged a reputation as a painter of deeply distinctive and dream-like visions inspired by the Surrealist movement. Adnams exhibited almost continuously in London and regional art galleries from the late 1930s and examples of her work can be found in many public collections, alongside that of her friends and contemporaries Evelyn Gibbs and Eileen Agar. Despite this, her work is largely forgotten today. This important exhibition brings together the full and diverse range of her art for the first time in almost fifty years in a bid to recapture the legacy of this most remarkable artist.

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MARION ADNAMS: A SINGULAR WOMAN
MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

From 2 December 2017 to 4 March 2018
As per opening times at Museum and Art Gallery
FREE EVENT VISIT LIST OF EVENTS FOR EVERYONE

This exhibition was made possible with support from Art Fund.

This exhibition was curated in partnership with Val Wood, independent researcher, and Teresa Forde, Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Derby

Thanks to Lucy Bamford from Derby museums

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L'infante égarée

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The Living Tree

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Adnams, 'a singular woman'

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Aftermath 1946 by MARION ADNAMS - Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries

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Aldeburgh Festival Exhibition, Peter Pears Gallery, 9 -24 June 2006, catalogue number 45 Marion Adnams was a versatile artist and teacher, who was born and lived in Derby. Notable for her Surrealist works she was influenced by René Magritte and Paul Nash. She trained as a teacher of modern languages and gained an honours degree in 1919.

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Adnams' paintings and drawings for sale

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UK antique, collectable & estate live auctions

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Stephen Jones influenced by Adnam's work

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Homeland mistress inspired love of Art

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Municipal Technical College, Art College, University of Derby Arts, Design and Technology, Derby Theatre

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Historic building

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Manchester Art Gallery The Distraught

Infanta (1944)

The Living Tree (1939) purchased from Stafford Gallery, 1939.

Salford Art Gallery

Variation on Red (1949)

Nottingham Museum and Art Gallery

Three Stones (1968)

Spring in the Cemetery (1956)

Leicester Art Gallery

Coloured Ending (1962)

Aftermath (1946) was sold in 2006 to the National Galleries of Scotland, National Gallery of Modern Art , Glasgow. The list price was $ 4,154 – Christies, South Kensington.

Derby

Alter Ego (1940)

Monkey Harvest (1945)

The Seven Lamps (1956)

Les Charrettes (1958)

The Grass of the Fields

For lo Winter is past (1963)

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denoting or referring to just one person or thing

exceptionally good or great; remarkable.

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Private View: Friday 21 January 2011, 17.30-20.00

Three Stones in the City of Ladies* is a group exhibition about repetition and looking back. The works in the show are gathered around a painting from the Nottingham City Museums and Gallerie's collection; a surrealist landscape called Three Stones by Marion Adnams (1898 – 1995). Adnams was born in Derby and lived most of her life in the city. Although she achieved some success in her lifetime, her work is not widely known and so this exhibition, which includes loans from Derby Museum and Art Gallery, hopes to contribute to a history of her work.

Three Stones has inspired the exhibition's other theme, of repetition in representations by women artists: replicating or doubling, mirroring and masking. The works sit at a point where the repetition of an image takes a turn towards abstraction or pattern-making.

You will also be able to see a display of material from Drifting and Dreaming, the Spring/Summer 2011 collection from Stephen Jones Millinery inspired by Marion Adnams.

*The show's title joins Adnams' painting with Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), an extended allegory in defence of women in which de Pizan recounts the work and achievements of famous women through history. Each woman is a brick in the walls of the city, which she also inhabits.

Link to Nottingham Castle's facebook page here

About the Curator

Elisa Kay is the Contemporary Art Society Centenary Fellow at Nottingham Castle & Art Gallery.

Elisa is also Curator at Flat Time House, the former home and studio of the late British artist John Latham. During her time working at the house she has established a pioneering programme that has included Latham's contemporaries and collaborators as well as work by more recent generations of artists.

Recent projects have included a solo exhibition of John Latham's work at Lisson Gallery, The Lisson Gallery does not exist for 100 years, and a new commission and exhibition by Laure Prouvost. Forthcoming exhibitions at Flat Time House include solo shows by Bea McMahon and Carlyle Reedy.

Centenary Curatorial Fellowships: Towards establishing new strategies for curating and working with public collections. Working in partnership with our member museums to draw additional curatorial skills in to their teams is a new working model for the Contemporary Art Society.

Also opening on the same night in Nottingham, Anne Collier and Jack Goldstein at Nottingham Contemporary, 18.00-21.00

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Collecting the Contemporary for Tomorrow

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Private View: Friday 21 January 2011, 17.30-20.00 Three Stones in the City of Ladies* is a group exhibition about repetition and looking back. The works in the show are gathered around a painting from the Nottingham City Museums and Gallerie's collection; a surrealist landscape called Three Stones by Marion Adnams (1898 - 1995).

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Marion's childhood home to which she returned until her death in 1995

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Rene Magritte, The Storm, 1927

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Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933

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Marion Adnams

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Marion Adnams

(b. 1899 Derby, England — d. 1995 Derby, England)
Although she wanted to study art, Marion Adnams instead studied modern languages in 1919 at University College, Nottingham encouraged by her parents . In 1930 she attend part-time lifeclasses at Derby School of Art whilst teaching modern languages. In the 1950s she became Head of Art at the Derby Diocesan College of Education. Her work was influenced by her drawing tutor at the School of Art, the surrealist painter Alfred Bladen, and she started to exhibit in London in 1939; her influences extend to Magritte, Paul Nash and Dalí. She later returned to live in her parents’ house where she died in 1995.

from Angels of Anarchy Exhibition

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Marion Adnams was a versatile artist and teacher, who was born and lived in Derby. Notable for her Surrealist works she was influenced by René Magritte and Paul Nash. She trained as a teacher of modern languages and gained an honours degree in 1919. She attended life classes at Derby School of Art and, in 1936 began to paint with a view to getting her art teacher’s diploma. She gained it in 1938 and was appointed art mistress at Homelands Grammar School for Girls, Derby. She became senior lecturer and head of the department in art at Derby Training College in 1946. She retired in 1960, and then spent much time painting in France.

In 1964-5, she completed a series of murals for Immanuel Church, Stapenhill, Burton-upon-Trent, but she had to cease painting in 1968 because of failing eyesight.

From the end of the 1930s for about 30 years Marion Adnams showed continuously in London and the provinces and had a retrospective exhibition at Midland Group Gallery in 1971.

Public collections in Manchester, Salford, Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and Wolverhampton hold examples of her works. Adnams was a singular woman, who had lived for years in the same tiny house which, even when she was old and blind, appeared as fresh as a St Ives studio of the 1930s. But she could be difficult to deal with, and among the people she fell out with was her mother, also an artist of talent.

(David Buckman, The Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945, Art Dictionaries Ltd, 1998, page 55)

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Magritte was also influenced by de Chirico's 'arid landscapes'

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Short clip of Green Lane where Adnams studied art

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 a 3-D spinning model of a painting (Marion Adnams’ Lost Infant)

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 a 3-D spinning model of a painting (Marion Adnams’ Lost Infant)

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'artworks are brought to life in a way that encourages collaboration'