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British born Romany Eveleigh passing in 2020, while living in Rome, marks the end of the career of one of the rarest of artists: a minimal abstractionist who manage to bring together the two worlds of minimalist painting and the radical lesbian movement of Paris and Rome in the mid 70s.
Championed by Barbara Rose, the famed American art historian, and by Michele Causse, the French writer who believed that the women’s movement was sustained only by lesbians, Eveleigh stands out for her uncompromising minimal, text-based vocabulary.
Eveleigh was born in London in December 1934, the daughter of an artist and an artist’s model. Within a few months of Eveleigh being born the family moved to Shanghai. In 1939 the family emigrated to Canada and her initial studies were in Montreal. Eveleigh returned to the UK in 1955, studying painting at the Slade and remained in London till 1962. Around 1963 she met the famed Italian photojournalist Anna Baldazzi in Ibiza and they became lifelong partners, with Eveleigh moving to Rome, where she maintained a residence for the rest of her life (Baldazzi and Eveleigh ultimately married, becoming one of the first same-sex marriages in Rome).
Rome, in the 60s, was a dynamic and innovative place, and this fed into Eveleigh’s work of the period: experimenting with new forms and media, formulating her abstract language. Towards the 70s Eveleigh began to forge many relationships with the European feminist / lesbian movement notably Michele Causse, Patrizia Cavalli and Alicia Ceresa who all wrote on her work.
It was during this period that she began one of her most important bodies of work: Pages, 1972. A series based on the relationship between language and the body: we will be presenting some of these rare works at Frieze Masters. The repetition of cramped circles populating the Pages series, are emblematic of laborious, repetitive tasks – a contested surface of the feminine realm, as articulated by one of Italy's most important and original philosophers of the post war period, Giorgio Agamben.
In 1996, the American critic and art historian Barbara Rose observed: “She, like Rothko, Newman and Motherwell, is not an orthodox geometric purist, but an artist who sees painting as presence, as a direct confrontation on a one-to-one basis between the spectator and the work of art whose visible brush work reminds us that the hand of the artist, rather than any mechanical system, produced the work”.
Eveleigh’s death in 2020 marked the end of a peripatetic life: she travelled
extensively throughout Europe in the 70s, returning to Montreal in 1977. From the 1980s until 2013 she maintained studios in Montreal, New York (with James Bishop) and Rome. In 2002 she was elected Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts.