Interior (Green Lights)

Location

Country: Turkey
City: Ankara
Place: British Embassy

Moreton's interiors are reminiscent of those by Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940). In Moreton’s work, historical events, fables and found images collide. These paintings of interiors are part of a large body of work that is concerned with unpicking some of the myths surrounding the Austrian Hapsburg Empire (1867–1918). Feeling that the paintings of the Austrian artist Ferdinand Waldmüller (1793–1865) promote a fantasy of the ideal home, Moreton has described how she wants to disrupt a sense of cosiness in her domestic spaces.  

Although there is a deliberate nod to the work of another Austrian, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Moreton acknowledges an ambivalence in her work where a house can be seen as a refuge, but also a suffocating place and a site of oppression: 

'There is this ambivalence all the time because I long for the homely and all those kind of things and at the same time struggle to be free. .... My friend just had a baby and you can see the dilemma in the baby. You see it rigid with the desire to move and it can't yet and it's fascinating because it seems that the human being has two conflicting needs. I suppose that is what always has to be going on in my paintings'.

Eleanor Moreton was born in London and studied at Chelsea College of Art and UCE Birmingham. Moreton was the 2007-08 Durham Cathedral Artist in Residence. She was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize, 2008 and the Threadneedle Prize, Mall Galleries, London, 2009.

Places

Subjects

abstract, domestic interior

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Eleanor Moreton (1956 - )

Title

Interior (Green Lights)

Date

2010

Medium

Oil on canvas

Acquisition

Purchased from Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, March 2011

Inscription

verso, on foldback, t: INTERIOR - GREEN LIGHT ; b: E. MORETON 2010

Provenance

Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool

GAC number

18389