Romany Eveleigh : Contested Surfaces
15 January - 19 February 2026 New York
Overview
Richard Saltoun is pleased to present Contested Surfaces, a solo exhibition dedicated to Romany EVELEIGH (1934–2020). This presentation marks Eveleigh's first solo exhibition in New York in nearly two decades, highlighting her deep and historic ties to the city. During the 1970s and 80s, Eveleigh was a fixture of the New York art world, maintaining a shared studio with the painter James Bishop and exhibiting often at Artist's Space and Kouros Gallery. Her presence in the city was further solidified by the support of the renowned critic and art historian Barbara Rose, who championed her work alongside the giants of American abstraction.
 
The exhibition follows a period of significant global reappraisal of her legacy, most notably her inclusion in the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, in 2024. This renewed international attention is mirrored by major recent institutional milestones, including the acquisition of her work by the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is also included in other leading collections such as the Tate in London, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Roberts Institute of Art.
 
Born in London and raised in Shanghai and Canada, Eveleigh studied at the Slade School of Fine Art before settling in Rome in 1963 with her lifelong partner, photojournalist Anna Baldazzi. Immersed in the city's dynamic 1960s avant-garde and later its feminist movements, Eveleigh developed an uncompromising vocabulary that renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben described as landscapes of cognition. Her practice explores the material dimension of language, blurring the lines between the act of writing and the act of painting.
 
The current presentation highlights a pivotal transition in Eveleigh's practice: her move away from the circular motifs of the 1970s toward the linear logic of the Fra Le Righe series. Commencing in 1980, these collages utilize plain and lined newsprint to create contested surfaces where the manual process is privileged over a final, static resolution. This fascination with the repetitive mark culminates in the monumental late work One Liners from 2017. Composed of oil and pastel on 173 individual strips of paper, this work invites viewers to superimpose their own memories onto marks that appear to dissolve into the support.
 
Barbara Rose observed that Eveleigh was not a geometric purist but an artist who saw painting as a direct, one-to-one confrontation between the spectator and the hand of the artist. By rejecting mechanical systems in favor of this intimate, physical presence, Eveleigh's work continues to challenge the boundaries of minimal abstraction. This exhibition reaffirms her legacy as a pioneering figure whose career, spanning continents and subcultures, has made a profound and lasting contribution to the post-war contemporary canon.
 
 
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