A nomadic traveller throughout most of her life, Eveleigh was a reclusive figure and seldom exhibited. In 1963, Eveleigh was in Ibiza performing a 'happening’ with Salvador Dali when she met the photojournalist Anna Baldazzi, who was to become her long-life partner and wife. It was Baldazzi who introduced Eveleigh to the radical feminist movement led by the lesbian activist Michèle Causse, one of the artist's early champion’s.
Working in relative solitude in Rome, Eveleigh approached art making as a form of contemplative mark-making, borrowing techniques and materials from the world of writing. She preferred working on square or near-square supports with white background, the canvases never larger than the size of her body and outstretched arms.
Richard Saltoun Gallery will debut Eveleigh in the UK at Frieze Masters 2022, with a solo booth showcasing the artist’s most important works. Among them is the Pages series from the 1970s, in which the repetition of cramped circles is emblematic of women's repetitive tasks in the domestic environment, as articulated by one of Italy’s most relevant and original philosophers of the post-war period, Giorgio Agamben.
The famed American art historian Barbara Rose also championed Eveleigh, describing her 1980s paintings - dominated by geometric compositions and organic shapes - as 'spiritual retreats that calm and center the mind, in the same manner as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell'.
Richard Saltoun Gallery will represent the Estate of Romany Eveleigh in collaboration with Galerie Bellemare Lambert, Montreal, Canada.
