Red Couch

Eleanor Moreton (1956 - )

Oil on canvas

2010

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  • About the work
    Location
    Country: Turkey
    City: Ankara
    Place: British Embassy

    Using narrow colour ranges and patterns, Eleanor Moreton’s uninhabited, claustrophobic 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'.
  • About the artist
    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.
  • Explore
    Places
    Subjects
    abstract, domestic interior
    Materials & Techniques
    canvas, oil, oil painting
  • Details
    Artist
    Eleanor Moreton (1956 - )
    Title
    Red Couch
    Date
    2010
    Medium
    Oil on canvas
    Dimensions
    height: 30.00 cm, width: 40.00 cm
    Acquisition
    Purchased from Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, March 2011
    Inscription
    verso on foldback, t: RED COUCH 2010 ; b: Eleanor Moreton
    Provenance
    Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool
    GAC number
    18388