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Night Work is about to Commence
© the artist's estate. Photo credit: Birmingham Museums Trust

Night Work is about to Commence 1940–1943

Emmy Bridgwater (1906–1999)

Birmingham Museums Trust

Surrealist painter, draughtsman and, from the 1970s, collagist, born in Edgbaston, Birmingham. She studied art there, in Oxford and London; Bernard Fleetwood-Walker taught her at Birmingham School of Art, Iain Macnab at Grosvenor School of Art. When in 1936 she saw the International Surrealist Exhibition in London this shaped the future course of her work, and soon after this she joined the Birmingham Group of Surrealists and the Surrealist group in England in 1940. Became a member of the LG and lived in London for periods. Held a first solo show at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery in 1942. During the 1940s she contributed to several international Surrealist publications, then in 1947 was invited by André Breton to the Galerie Maeght international Surrealist show in Paris where she signed the English group’s Declaration.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)

Artworks by Emmy Bridgwater

  • Night Work is about to Commence
    Night Work is about to Commence Emmy Bridgwater (1906–1999)
    Birmingham Museums Trust

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Emmy Bridgwater studied at Birmingham School of Art (1926– 27), Oxford School of Art and Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London, under lain MacNab (1890–1967).

She joined the British Surrealist Group in 1940 and was a founding member of the Birmingham Surrealist Group, contributing significant pieces to the movement in subsequent years. Like many female Surrealists, Bridgwater focused on recreating myths and fairy tales as seen from a female perspective, in a distinctly Surrealist exploration of the strange and empowerment of the feminine.

After a brief affair with Toni del Renzio (1915–2007) at the start of WWII, her first solo exhibition was held in 1942 at the Modern Art Gallery, London, and she also exhibited at the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, as well as with the LG, at the AIA and Brook Street Art Gallery, and she later contributed to frequent Surrealist revival exhibitions which toured Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.

Biography from Liss Llewellyn

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