A landmark exhibition showcasing the work of Ithell Colquhoun will debut at Tate St Ives, Cornwall, from 1 February to 5 May 2025 (followed by a presentation at Tate Britain from 13 June to 19 October 2025). This exhibition will be the largest collection of Colquhoun’s work ever assembled, featuring over 170 artworks and archival materials, including paintings, drawings, and writings, many of which have never been displayed publicly before.
The exhibition will utilise Tate’s extensive archive of the artist’s work to trace Colquhoun’s evolution, highlighting her early pieces, her involvement with the Surrealist movement, and her deep interest in the interconnected themes of art, sexual identity, ecology, magic, and mysticism.
Watch this fascinating documentary by Tate on Queer Cornwall and the artists Marlow Moss, Gluck and Ithell Colquhourn in Lamorna …
The exhibition will follow a loosely chronological path, mapping the influence of esoteric and surrealist concepts on the artist’s evolving practice from the mid-1920s to the 1980s. It will feature early paintings from her time at the Slade School of Fine Art, including Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929). In this work, Colquhoun merges biblical themes with subversive occultist elements, challenging social conventions to express her personal beliefs.
Tate St Ives will showcase costume designs for the play The Bird of Hermes, created around 1926. This work marks the first direct reference to occultist concepts in her practice, which helped communicate these ideas to a broader audience.
The exhibition will examine Colquhoun’s visual and conceptual engagement with Surrealism during the 1930s and 1940s. Botanical works, such as Water-Flower (1938), will highlight her evolving vision and interest in the uncanny.
Colquhoun became increasingly focused on representations of the human body through the surrealist concept of the ‘double image’ during this period. This is exemplified in her celebrated work, Scylla (méditerranée) from 1938, which merges the female form with the natural landscape. The exhibition will also provide the first opportunity to see Colquhoun’s complete storyboard for an unproduced surrealist film titled Bonsoir, created in 1939.
A significant turning point occurred in 1939 when she met Gordon Onslow Ford and Roberto Matta. They were employing surrealist automatist techniques, creating imagery through chance rather than conscious control, aimed at exploring the human psyche and other metaphysical realms. This approach became central to the development of Colquhoun’s intertwined artistic and occult practices during the early 1940s when she began to move away from traditional painting techniques.
Her influential essay, The Mantic Stain, written in 1949, examined the spiritual possibilities of automatism. The upcoming exhibition will showcase a collection of paintings created using the decalcomania technique. This method involves pressing two surfaces covered with paint together to create a mirror image without the intentional involvement of the artist’s hand.
Works such as Attributes of the Moon (1947) and Gorgon (1946) will highlight her fascination with channeling the spirit world. For the first time, these paintings will be displayed alongside their corresponding transfer papers to illustrate Colquhoun’s artistic process.
Colquhoun’s deepening interest in occultism grew throughout the 1940s, incorporating ancient philosophical principles such as alchemy, paganism, animism, and mysticism. This was also influenced by her unique perspectives on gender fluidity and her desire to harness divine feminine power. Her works from this period, created for both her own spiritual growth and public exhibition, are rich with magical symbolism, dynamic energy channels, and portals to other dimensions, depicted through spatial diagrams known as tesseracts.
Other groups of works, including a series titled The Diagrams of Love (1940-1942), reflect kabbalistic, tantric, and alchemical concepts. These works portray the merging of male and female forms to create an androgynous whole.
Colquhoun’s perception of the world as a connected spiritual cosmos led her to Cornwall in the early 1940s, where she deepened her creative explorations. Her inspiration was drawn from the region’s ancient landscape, Celtic mythologies, and neolithic monuments.
Having divided her time between London and West Penwith, she acquired a studio in Lamorna in 1949 before finally settling in Paul. She published extensively, including essays, Surrealist novels, and atmospheric travelogues, such as The Living Stones: Cornwall in 1957.
Colquhoun’s fascination with the mystical nature of Celtic lands will be highlighted through visionary works depicting sacred sites and standing stone formations in Cornwall, Ireland, and Brittany. This includes Dance of the Nine Opals from 1942, which will be presented in the exhibition for the first time.
The exhibition will conclude with a section highlighting Colquhoun’s enamel drip techniques, which she developed during the later years of her life. This section will feature designs for a set of ‘Taro’ cards—an innovative series often regarded as the most remarkable fusion of Colquhoun’s art and her magical practice. In this work, she completely moved away from figuration.
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds on show from 1 February to 5 May 2025 at Tate St Ives, Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 1TG, United Kingdom
All images supplied