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'.

Places

Subjects

abstract, domestic interior

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

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