One of the most radical artists of her generation, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was an important, but often overlooked figure in British Surrealism. At Tate Britain following a run at Tate St Ives, this landmark exhibition is the largest of Colquhoun’s work ever staged, featuring over 130 paintings and drawings; many of which have never been publicly exhibited.

The exhibition draws on Tate’s significant archive of the artist’s work, tracing the evolution of Colquhoun’s work from her early narrative paintings and engagement with the Surrealist movement, to her fascination with the intertwining realms of art, sexual identity, ecology, magic and mysticism.

The exhibition explores Colquhoun’s visual and conceptual engagement with surrealism in the 1930s and 40s. Botanical works such as Water-Flower 1938 show her evolving interest in a spiritual natural world. Colquhoun also became increasingly focused on representations of the human body through the surrealist ‘double image’ during this period, exemplified in Scylla (méditerranée) 1938, one of her most celebrated works, which merges the female form with the natural landscape. The exhibition offers the first chance to see Colquhoun’s storyboard for an unmade surrealist film titled Bonsoir 1939 in its entirety.

Tate Britain’s exhibition explores how Colquhoun engaged with the London art world through her exhibitions at the Mayor Gallery in 1939 and 1947 and offer an insight into Colquhoun’s contributions to surrealist concepts such as automatism. A turning point in her practice came in 1939 when she met Gordon Onslow Ford and Roberto Matta, who were using surrealist automatist techniques to create imagery through chance rather than conscious control. Their development of earlier surrealist ideas of automatism was intended to mine both the human psyche and other metaphysical realms. The exhibition explores how this approach became central to the evolution of Colquhoun’s intertwining artistic and occultist practice during the early 1940s when she moved away from traditional painting techniques. Her influential essay The Mantic Stain,1949 explored the spiritual possibilities of automatism, and the exhibition presents a group of paintings made using the decalcomania technique, involving the pressing together of two surfaces covered with paint to create a mirror image produced without the intentional use of the artist’s hand. Works such as Attributes of the Moon 1947 and Gorgon 1946 will show her preoccupation with channelling the spirit world. These works are shown alongside Colquhoun’s automatic experiments to demonstrate her process.