Penelope Curtis – författare

By taking simple ways of looking at sculpture, this book uncovers unexpected affinities between works of very different periods and types. From sundials to mirrors, from graves to way-markers, from fountains to contemporary art, a wide range of illustrated examples expands the definitions of sculpture and proposes that we understand this art as something more fundamental to the way we experience and construct our rites of passage.Penelope Curtis argues that there are some basic functions shared by many kinds of three-dimensional objects, be they more or less obviously sculptural. Even contemporary sculpture, with no apparent purpose, makes use of this deeply embedded vocabulary. Together, the qualities of vertical, horizontal, closed and open are consolidated in the ensemble, which places the viewer at its heart, on the threshold of sculpture and on the threshold of change. This book elides the usual notions of figurative and abstract to think instead about how sculpture works.  Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Banyuls-sur-Mer, French Catalonia: one hot summer in the 1970s, the lives of three generations of women converge in the long tropical garden hidden behind the Villa Wintrebert, named after the biologist wholived there with his wife. As in her debut After Nora (2024), Penelope Curtis deftly weaves fact and fiction in this moving story of childhood and of adult complicity. Harmony beween la belle Eugénie and the young Monique is disrupted when a well-intentioned commission to the renowned local sculptor, Aristide Maillol, shines a light on the fundamental fragility of the women’s relationship, on whichthe villa and its garden had depended. Decades later, Monique invites Eva and her two little girls into the villa, where traces of the past imprint themselves on the present.

Best-known for her ambitious sculptural works, this volume explores how Alison Wilding’s compelling drawing and extensive use of collage have been integral to her development for five decades. Whilst sharing affiliations with Wilding’s three-dimensional work, the artist’s drawings – often in series – expand upon her investigation of surface by using a distinctive formal language. The works are characterised by a strong interplay between representation and metaphor, incorporating a range of materials – from ink to silicone fluid – to visualise and test ideas of mass and depth.Alongside essays by Anna Lovatt and Penelope Curtis, and an in-conversation with the artist by Rosie Cooper, this full-colour survey of over 300 illustrations offers the opportunity to track subtle correspondences in forms and concepts between historic and recent series of works. This publication was conceived by gallerist and Ridinghouse founder Karsten Schubert.

Uncovers the significance of walls in the drawings of Henry Spencer Moore after World War II. Henry Spencer Moore (1898–1986) was one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. This book and exhibition offer a new reading of Moore's celebrated Shelter series and the artist's fascination with images of walls during and immediately after World War II. Henry Moore: Shadows on the Wall accompanies a focused exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. After the destruction of his London studio early in World War II, Henry Moore began drawing figures sheltering from bomb raids in the London Underground. The walls of these sheltered spaces came to absorb his attention in an altogether new way, becoming scene-setters and key components of his drawings. This fascination with the bricks and the presence of walls, their texture, mass, and volume, became especially important after his project to illustrate the wartime radio play The Rescue, based on Homer's Odyssey. Henry Moore, a collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation, suggests for the first time that the walls in his drawings offer a new way to understand some of his most individual and monumental post-war sculpture projects.

The Gulbenkian Museum published its long-awaited catalogue of Calouste Gulbenkian’s collection of illuminated manuscripts, marking the culmination of several years of research and collaboration by a group of international scholars.This group of works, which was particularly prized by the collector, was acquired for his own personal enjoyment and kept at his home in Paris before being transferred to Portugal. In the 1960s, when they were housed at the Marques de Pombal Palace in Oeiras, the codices were damaged by flooding. The restoration work that allowed these specimens to be studied and exhibited at long last was only completed in 2014.The first article, by Manuela Fidalgo, the emeritus curator of this group of works from the collection, explores the milestone moments in the creation of the collection, homing in on Gulbenkian’s choices and the way in which he sought to preserve his books. She has also written a brief account of the flooding of 1967 and the restoration of the damaged specimens.The second essay, by François Avril, former curator of the Manuscripts Department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an expert in medieval manuscript volumes and the scientific coordinator of this catalogue, takes an in-depth look at the specimens that make up the collection, plotting the timeline of the acquisitions and uncovering their provenance. The catalogue, which covers 27 books and 10 fragments, was coordinated by Angela Dillon Bussi, a specialist in medieval history and former assistant director of the Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, Venice and the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence.The catalogue entries, which are all illustrated, divide the codices into two sections. The first puts forward a codicological study by Angela Dillon Bussi, in collaboration with Davide Baldi Bellini. The second explores the history, content and artistic importance of the pieces, with contributions from renowned experts such as Angela Dillon Bussi, Federica Toniolo, François Avril, Giordana Mariani Canova, James Marrow, Jonathan Alexander, Lieve de Kessel and Nigel J. Morgan.

In early 1920s England, Nora's life is in a state of flux: leaving one husband for another, she embarks on a new existence on the margins of the cultural and political elite, trying to hold onto her aspirations as a painter, along with her marriage. In late 1960s Glasgow, young biologist Maria de Sousa wrestles with her feelings for an older colleague, Adam Curtis, the author's father. The unclear connection between the two impels the author, fifty years later, to seek out answers in Lisbon: what really happened between Adam and Maria? After Nora bridges three generations spanning a century, and moves between London, Paris, southern England, Scotland, Jamaica and Portugal, touching on key scientific discoveries, artistic and historical landmarks, the Carnation Revolution and a global pandemic. Penelope Curtis offers sensitive portraits of those whose lives she has had to imagine in order to understand, in an ambitious debut that movingly resurrects a past whose remnants still permeate the present.