Madge Gill

(1882 London–1961 London)
ABSTRACT
 
 

PROVENANCE
Henry Boxer Gallery, Outsider & Visionary Art, Richmond, London, Estate Madge Gill
Galerie Roche, Bremen
German private property
European private property
      
EXHIBITION
Madge Gill, Works on Paper and Canvas, Galerie Roche, Bremen 1992
      
Beyond a doubt Madge Gill is one of the outsider-artists who attracted great attention. She is represented in important outsider-art collections, including the Collection de L’Art Brut in Lausanne and the L’Aracine Collection of the LaM – Lille Métropole, musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut.
 
Madge Gill created numerous post card drawings in black ink or occasionally in pencil. Like her other large-scale drawings and her calicos measuring several meters – panels of fabric for which her son invented a mechanism to unwind them and wind them up – they are influenced by her “spirit” and spiritual leader Myrninerest, whom Gill considered the rightful owner of her works.
 
Gill’s drawings exude horror vacui. The present sheet is populated by countless variations of a female figure with large round eyes, a little snub nose, curls and a head covering, often imbedded in an abstract architectural backdrop.
 
In Gill’s “Abstracts” the architectural backdrop takes on a life of its own with a fascinating dynamic. The improvisations have an almost hallucinatory character. Their wealth of shapes and forms seems to have no limits; it includes interwoven checkerboard patterns, gridlines and steps, which draw the onlooker’s gaze into the depth, as well as light and airy creations of floral appearance.
 
A large convolute of Madge Gill’s drawings is available on personal request.
      
      
MADGE GILL
 
1882 London–1961 London. Maude Ethel Eades, a child born-out-of-wedlock, was raised by her mother and aunt in the East Ham, Essex. At the age of nine-years-old, she was placed in an orphanage; five years later she was shipped to Canada as a temporary worker. She managed to return to London in 1903, where her aunt took her in and she worked as a carer at a hospital. In 1907 she married Tom Gill, her aunt’s son, and in the course of the following six years she gave birth to three sons. Her second born died from Spanish flu in 1918. In 1919 Madge Gill was with child again, however, the girl was stillborn. Gill became seriously ill and lost the sight of her left eye. She suffered more calamities: her youngest son Bob was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. She cared for him for two years and drew and wrote by his bedside. In 1933 her husband died.
On March 3, 1920, just a few weeks after she had physically recovered, her “spirit” Myrninerest (meaning something like “my inner calm”) appeared for the first time. He was to accompany her for the rest of her life. His presence released several strands of creativity in Madge Gill: she wrote, knitted, crocheted, weaved, played the piano and drew.
Madge Gill accumulated her works at her house in East Ham; the full extend of her oeuvre only became known after she died in 1961. Her son donated a large part of her body of work to the London Borough of Newham. [1]