Artwork of the Week!! Sun, April 16, 2023, A unique work by Pamela Boden (1905-1981): "Giraffes", shaped wood sculpture, ca 1950. $22,000.00.

Artwork of the Week!! Sunday, April 2, 2023, A unique work by British/American sculptor Pamela Boden (1905-1981).

?"Giraffes" (also called 'Girondelle for Giraffes') is a unique sculpture, done using shaped wood, glued and added modeling paste by British-born California artist Pamela Boden (1905-1981) done around 1950. The work measures 33-3/4" high, 30" wide, and 12' deep. inches. This work is unsigned as usual. It is illustrated in color in volume 1 of St. Gaudens/Schiffer 'Emerging from the Shadows', page 77. Our inventory number for this sculpture is 15524.

This unique California AbEx sculpture by Pamela Boden is available from the gallery for $22,000.00.

Contact the gallery with any condition or other questions. Shipping costs will be discussed. California residents will have sales tax added. Out of state residents may be responsible for use tax, depending on state law.Pamela Boden lived and exhibited in Paris in the 1930's and was associated with the Surrealists. She was a close friend of composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Stanley Bate (to whom she was briefly married). She designed the decor for Bates' 1939 revival of 'Perseus.'

"Giraffes" was exhibited with 6 other sculptures in 1978 through the Australia Music Centre in Sydney with the help of avant-garde composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks and music expert and author James Murdoch. Each sculpture had a short composition written for it, each by a different composer. Giraffes was exhibited with a composition by Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks titled "Girondelle for Giraffes."

There is an experimental film by "Dunite" artist Elwood Decker done in 1947 that uses Boden's sculpture in the beginning of the film. It can be seen at: https://elwooddecker.com/ColorFragments.html

Pamela Boden's work is discussed and shown on pages 76 through 81 of volume I in Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960.

Pamela Boden was born in Derbyshire, England on April 23, 1905.?She was principally home-tutored except for one year at Heathfield. When she was seventeen, her family moved to Germany, where she studied music and art in Dresden and Munich. She also studied life drawing in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1927, Boden moved to the South of France where she began an irreverent novel, Persian Paradise; while never published, her writing set the tone for the attitude she displayed in her future work, whatever the form. Returning to Paris, Boden began to associate with the artistic community and met the English composer Stanley Bate, who she briefly married (as a joke; they were both gay) and who exposed her to the contemporary music scene where she met the avant garde Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Among of her circle of friends were the Surrealists, Dadaists, and Cubists including sculptors Hans (Jean) Arp and Ossip Zadkine and the painter Albert Gleizes. Another close friend was the Portuguese writer and film maker Virginia de Castro e Almeida with whom Boden began a relationship that lasted until Virginia's death.

At age twenty-seven, Boden began to carve decorative panels but soon turned to three-dimensional sculpture.?In 1936 she had her first one-woman show in Paris at a small gallery and exhibited at La Salon d'Automne with Albert Gleizes's group. Stanley Bate had joined the Arts Theatre group at the end of 1939 and revived his score for the ballet Perseus. Boden designed the decor and costumes for Perseus and Keith Lester provided the choreography and Harold (Hal) Turner danced the title role. Perseus was performed in London on July 2, 1940 at The Arts Theatre Club. During this time Boden was living on the Ile St. Louis in the apartment Corbusier had designed for Helena Rubenstein.

In 1938, Pamela and Virginia moved to Portugal where Pamela illustrated a number of Virginia's books and exhibited her sculpture in Lisbon. In November of 1940 Boden, Antonio Dacosta and Antonio Pedro organized the first Surrealist exhibition, titled EXPoem Esculture e Pintura at Repe House in Lisbon, Portugal, which was a key exhibition in Portugal for modernism. Boden exhibited six of her carved and assembled wooden sculptures.

After Virginia died in 1945 Boden immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. In 1946 she exhibited in a two-person show titled 5 Sculptures / Pamela Bodin (sic) / Clyfford Still: First Exhibition - Paintings from February 12 to March 7 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery at 30 West 57th Street. Held in one of the four exhibition spaces, the Daylight Gallery, Boden showed five sculptures carved from Portuguese "cyclone-felled cedar" which were placed in the center of the gallery, surrounded by Still's paintings. The show was to have run between February 12 and March 2 but, due to a strike, received little press coverage and was extended to March 7. Additionally, her name was misspelled in all of the marketing leading up to the show, and thus the show did not provide the exposure an artist would otherwise have gained at a Peggy Guggenheim gallery. Despite these setbacks, comments on Boden's work were favorable, including that of art critic Emily Genauer who praised Boden's work as "highly original, sharply rythmic in their organization, and full of clean strength." The Art News review appraised the work as having "considerable ingenuity" with their "sharp, deep cuts, leaving the coarse grain mostly unpolished, and often utelizing knotholes."

Wanting a change of scenery, Boden, who was drawn to the high desert country, moved to New Mexico later that year and would remain there until 1955. During this period she showed with the Galeria Escondida, operated by Eulalia Emertaz in Taos, New Mexico, which was also exhibiting work by Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Corbett, Bea Mandelman, Louis Ribak, Andrew Dasberg and other Modernist painters living in Taos. In 1948, her sculptures were used in the avant-garde abstract film Color Fragments by the visionary artist/filmmaker Elwood Decker (1903-1992).

Between August 8 and 29, 1948 she exhibited in a two-person exhibition at the American Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles.?The featured works were wood engravings by Rouault and "Introducing Fantastic Sculpture by Pamela Boden."?The gallery, located at 6727-1/2 Hollywood Boulevard was run by Barbara Byrnes and Clara Grossman and exhibited works by leading Surrealists - such as Man Ray - and showed experimental films by European Surrealists and Modernists. Elwood Decker created an experimental film for the opening of Boden's show that used her sculptures, flexible mirrors, and other film techniques he had developed. Boden's work was included in the "70th Western Annual" exhibition at the Denver Museum

To purchase this work, or read a biography for Pamela Boden use this link to our website: https://www.annexgalleries.com/inventory/artist/222/Boden/Pamela

Use this link to view our complete inventory on our website: https://www.annexgalleries.com/inventory?q