J U L I A - F A R R E R

1950
born London, UK
1968-72
The Slade School of Fine Art
1974-76
Harkness Fellow at the University of New Mexico and New York

Selected Public Collections

The Arts Council of Great Britain; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; La Fondation Rothschild, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; University of Houston, Texas; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, London; The Royal Hospitals NHS Trust, London; Stoy Hayward, London; La Bibliotheque National, Paris; Musee Departamental Stephane Mallarme, Vulaine-sur-Seine; Clifford Chance, London; Arthur Andersen Collection, London; Yale Center for British Art, CT, USA

Julia Farrer’s recent work explores transformations of geometric compositions from two into three dimensions, across the different media of painting, monoprinting, unique and small run artist’s books.

Experiments with scanning original drawings into a computer and extending them through plays with an anarchic and random geometry has led to a series of integrated works which show 'perfect' forms tumbling into chaos.

“...The acrylic painting has been sprayed on to these thin boards; there is no trace of the artist’s hand. Barely described, such paintings could seem mechanical, accomplished but impersonal; surprisingly, that is not the case. In each work one panel is more muted than the other, as if a shadow were swallowing the blues, violets, greys or eau-de-nil. Perhaps it is this undertow of darkness that gives these paintings their resonance - and distances them still more from any material tower.”

Extract from Julia Farrer: Transformations
by Andrew Mead
published in The Architects’ Journal, October 2000

Farrer's prints, in a variety of techniques and always abstract, are distinguished by restrained but great visual beauty and technical accomplishment. So are her books, in which the complexity of a geometric composition evolves from one page to the next. All her works, whether prints, books or paintings, are a piece linked by a common interest in geometric form…
… Her paintings retain the outstanding qualities of her prints, especially in the attention she pays to pristine surfaces and immaculate edges. All of these compositions exploit the ambiguities that result from representing a three-dimensional figure on a flat surface.

Frank Whitford, Sunday Times, August 26th 2007

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Double Theatre Variations III 2001 hand-coloured etching, edition 7 50.5 x 65.5cm £450 ex vat