Alison Dunhill

Alison Dunhill (born 1950) is an English artist and art historian, from London.

Biography

Dunhill trained in Fine Art at the University of Reading under Sir Terry Frost and Rita Donagh. In the early 1970s she had a studio in Florence where she associated with some of the key figures in the Situationist International,[1] including philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, the writer Gianfranco Sanguinetti and, later, the novelist and critic Michèle Bernstein.

Artistic career

Dunhill was primarily a landscape painter in her early career, and then explored more abstract forms, including mixed media artworks inspired by the surrealist ideas of chance and the found object.[2][3]

For much of her artistic career Dunhill maintained studios in London but she now lives and works in King's Lynn, Norfolk where she has a studio in the 15th century Hanseatic warehouse known as Hanse House. In 2015 she was awarded a residency at Despina (previously known as Largo das Artes), a contemporary art institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[4] She has exhibited frequently, most recently in London in February 2019 with a solo exhibition of new and recent work;[5][6] and in July 2019 she presented new works and installations with CUSP Artists at the Undercroft Gallery in Norwich.[7]

One of her drawings selected from the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL) was reproduced in The Women Artists Diary 1989.[8]

Selected Solo Exhibitions[9]
  • 1984 - Kingsgate Gallery, London
  • 1990 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
  • 1992 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
  • 1994 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
  • 1995 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
  • 2003 - 'Segments', Gallery 47, London
  • 2007 - Neptune Gallery, Hunstanton
  • 2013 - Flow Films, London
  • 2015 - Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro
  • 2018 - Fermoy Gallery, King's Lynn
  • 2019 - 'Upscape', A/side-B/side Gallery, London

Art historian

As an art historian, Dunhill completed an M.Phil thesis at the University of Essex on the modernist American photographer Francesca Woodman.[10] This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the six photographic books that Woodman compiled in her lifetime, and examines them in the context of surrealism which, Dunhill argues, was a significant influence on Woodman.[11] Her study of Woodman's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries[12] was published in re•bus in 2008.[13] Dunhill has presented papers on Woodman at academic conferences and gallery talks at the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College, Dublin and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.[14]

She contributed a memoir to a 2010 Paris exhibition catalogue of the artist and psychogeographer, and sometime Situationist, Ralph Rumney, whom she had befriended in the latter years of his life; and her published reviews include an assessment of Claudia Herstatt's Women Gallerists for Tate Etc.[15][16]

Poetry

Dunhill's early poetry collection, Gig Soup Scoop, published in 1972 by a small alternative press,[17] is now a rarity.[18]

More recently, two of her prose poems were long-listed for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize 2020.[19]

References
  1. Ralph Rumney – La Vie d'artiste. Paris: Editions Allia. 2010. pp. 22–23. ISBN 978-2-84485-391-2.
  2. "The Magical World of Alison Dunhill". 4 May 2018.
  3. "Surrealist-inspired works to fill King's Lynn gallery". 14 April 2018.
  4. "Despina: Artists in Residence".
  5. "Exhibition: Upscape - ArtUPcycling".
  6. "Alison Dunhill, Exhibition History".
  7. "CUSP Artists".
  8. "The Women Artists Diary 1989". London, The Women's Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-7043-4134-0
  9. "Alison Dunhill, Exhibition History".
  10. "Almost a square: The photographic books of Francesca Woodman and their relationship to surrealism". 2010.
  11. "Francesca Woodman's Books: Introduction" (PDF).
  12. Woodman, Francesca. Some disordered interior geometries. Philadelphia: Synapse Press, 1981. OCLC 11308833
  13. Dunhill, Alison. Dialogues with Diagrams. re•bus, 2008 Autumn/Winter, issue 2.
  14. "About Alison Dunhill".
  15. Herstatt, Claudia. Women Gallerists in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2008. ISBN 978-3-7757-1975-9
  16. "Books Etc".
  17. Dunhill, Alison. Gig Soup Scoop. London: Transgravity Advertiser, February 1972.
  18. "Gig Soup Scoop by Alison Dunhill. Transgravity Advertiser, London. Soft cover, Limited Edition - Colophon Books".
  19. "Flash Fiction Prize 2020 Long-list".
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