MERLYN EVANS (1910-1973) Biography
SURREALISM (founded c.1924) Biography

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, I Surrealisti, Milan, Palazzo Reale, 1989, page 470, illustrated
Mel Gooding, Merlyn Evans, Cameron & Hollis, Moffat 2010, page 86, illustrated page 86-7

Exhibition History

London, Leicester Galleries, Merlyn Evans- Imaginative Paintings, February 1949, catalogue number 10
Milan, Palazzo Reale, I Surrealisti, 15th May - 17th September 1989

Description / Expertise

Born in Cardiff in Wales, Merlyn Evans grew up near Glasgow, and from 1927 studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1930, he exhibited at the Royal Scottish academy and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art. He gained a Scholarship to the Royal College of Art and throughout his career he made etchings and aquatints and sculpture as marble carvings and bas-reliefs. His dedication to painting however, is expressed in his continued productions even during his service in World War II. As a soldier in North Africa, Syria and Italy, he was involved in heavy fighting. His works are often haunted with overt political statements, and more frequently, with images of his disquiet.

In 1988, Mel Gooding described elements of the artist's works:

Few artists are as critically conscious as Evans was of the fact that art is a means…by which we may picture and make visible those hidden relationships, correspondences and parallels…Evans wrote “I proceed form the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete”…His imagination was of a philosophical temper, finding forms of expression that were essentially metaphorical, presentations that have about them a theatrical air of ritual or ceremony, and intense formality. His paintings and prints even at their most rigorously abstract have always a subject, they refer always to something beyond, something encountered in the human world.