A Dance to the Music of Time

Westminster Arts Reference Library Gallery, London (off Leicester Square)

Monday 29th October - Saturday 10th November 2018

Private View - Thursday 1st November, 6 - 8pm

A Dance to the Music of Time I (1990) - Oil on Canvas 152cm x 183cm

This exhibition marks the presentation of Wendy Elia’s major new figurative painting, A Dance to the Music of Time II.  For the first time, her original A Dance to the Music of Time I (1990), will be seen with its pendant, A Dance to the Music of Time II, which revisits its protagonists almost 30 years later. Both works depict siblings Alexi and Madeleine, Elia’s children, engaged in introspective acts of movement and music-making in tilting rooms with dream-like vistas.

Details of A Dance to the Music of Time ll (2018) – Oil on Canvas 180cm x 220cm

Their titles derive from a seventeenth century painting by French master Nicolas Poussin, currently on display in London’s Wallace Collection. Like Poussin’s meditation on time, music, dance, and fortune, Elia’s oeuvre is replete with symbols and narrative mystery, alluding to myriad other artworks. Part psychological portraits, part exploration of the nature of creativity, part interior landscapes, part histories of London then and now, these paintings invite us to consider the fate of our own childhood aspirations.

Art Historian Marie-Anne Mancio will be visiting this as part of her Contemporary Art Day in London which you can book here >

https://www.hotelalphabet.com/product-page/the-body-in-art

Westminster Art Reference Library, 1st Floor (off Leicester Square)

35 St Martins Street

London

WC2H 7HP

Tube: Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross

Mon - Fri: 10am - 8pm, Sat: 10am - 2pm

The Westminster Arts Reference Library sits directly behind the National gallery in London’s West End, off Leicester Square and is built on the site of Isaac Newton’s house and observatory.