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Eleanor Moreton
Hibernia - Gathering, 2021 Oil on canvas
55 1/8 x 74 3/4 inches
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Unsettling and dreamlike, Eleanor Moreton builds fantastic fairy worlds peppered with fabled drama. With the richness of an old world tapestry, her world comes alive on canvas-- weasels bound, ravens lurk, children wander. There is an unmistakeable childlike wonder to her brush, underscored by a deeply intellectual longing for something that goes beyond the literal into the literary. "My characters precariously inhabit a world on the edge of the woods, on the edge of their own animal, wild selves and on the edge of the more unruly aspects of their minds," she says.
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Pupae, 2021Oil on canvas27 1/2 x 19 3/4 inches
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Windflower, 2021Oil on canvas27 3/4 x 21 1/2 inches
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The Big P, 2021Oil on canvas32 x 24 inches
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Moreton’s latest body of work echoes ideas from renowned German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s masterpiece monograph: Being and Time. Heidegger reframed the origins of culture and philosophy by emphasizing our thrownness in the world and how to authentically respond to the situations we find ourselves thrown into. Heidegger and Moreton comment on this authentic way of being through the act of making. In each of Moreton’s paintings titled “Dwelling”, “Building”, “Clearing”, and “Being”- Moreton’s work depicts figures experiencing the world in full color and texture. These titles speak to the Heidegger’s main point that being is inseparable from time and the world we exist within.
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Moreton writes, “My sources were illustrations of family life and childhood from that time, illustrations which informed my own childhood and which reflect this need for order, conformity and security. The painting titles are both nouns and verbs: Dwelling, Being, Clearing, Building, reflecting Heidegger’s ideas about the intrinsic ‘making’ nature of human beings.”
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Moreton’s dark figurative paintings are just as easily read as psychological meditations as they are florid interpretations of philosophy, literature, European history, and psychoanalysis. She is particularly drawn to fairytales and the fictions we create about ourselves individually and collectively.
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Eleanor Moreton studied painting at Exeter and Chelsea Colleges of Art, and Art History and Theory at UCE (University of Central England). Solo exhibitions include Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole (2023), Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (2019 and 2021), Exeter Phoenix, Exeter, (2017), The House of St Barnabas, London (2016), Canal, London (2015), Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool and London (2010, 2012 and 2014), and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2012). Her work has been reviewed in Art Monthly, Art in America, and The Guardian. Her work can be seen in The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting by Matt Price, (Anomie, 2018) and Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins, (Thames and Hudson, 2015). She has participated in art fairs including Frieze Art Fair, London, Art Rotterdam, NADA Miami, The Armory Show, New York, VOLTA, Basel and Manchester Contemporary.
DWELLING, BEING, CLEARING: ELEANOR MORETON
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