Hungarian-born artist, futurist, and theoretician Magda Cordell (1921–2008) was a pioneering figure in post-war British art and a founding member of the Independent Group—a collective that laid the groundwork for Pop Art through its engagement with mass culture and emerging technologies. The only female member of the Independent Group, she was a pioneer in the movement: her revolutionary paintings explore the disorder of human existence through the history of science and technology in a post-holocaust age.
Her paintings of the female form are a site of resilience and psychological depth. The art historian David Mellor rightly stated that what is “exceptional” about Cordell’s paintings “lies in their aspect of female signs; that is, they act as signs for an internal and—crucially—maternal body, unrepresented elsewhere in British art at this moment”. Her representation of the dismembered and abstracted female body, with the womb a central focus, was unparalleled in Britain at the time.
Cordell’s work was featured in Reyner Banham’s seminal 1955 essay The New Brutalism and exhibited at key venues including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1955), Hanover Gallery (1956), and the Whitechapel Gallery’s landmark This is Tomorrow exhibition (1956). Cordell moved to America in 1961 to study Futurology with her second husband John McHale.
Her work is held in major public collections, including Tate, London; the Dallas Art Museum, Texas; MOMA, NY; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.