Paule Vézelay Living Lines

This spring, the first major exhibition of Paule Vézelay’s work in over 40 years will tour to Towner, after its 2025 debut at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol.

Paule Vézelay (1892-1984) was responsible for an extraordinary output encompassing painting, collage, sculpture, constructions, illustration, textiles and photography. Living Lines offers an unprecedented insight into her accomplished seven-decade career, featuring over sixty works from private and public collections.

Seeking to rightly afford the artist’s place within the history of British and European Modernism, the exhibition will reveal how she became a prominent figure within the European avant-garde, working alongside some of the most significant artists of pre-war Paris including Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, Marlow Moss, Wassily Kandinsky and André Masson.

As well as bringing together examples of Vézelay’s best-known paintings and sculptures such as Object in Three Dimensions (1935) and Construction. Grey Lines on Pink Ground (1938) from the Tate Collection, the exhibition will feature several works which have not been publicly exhibited before, including Composition Objects and Sun (1930) and Eight Curved Forms and Two Circles (1946). 

Lunchtime Conversation: Alexander Calder's Maquette for a Mobile
Saturday 30 August, 1.30pm, Gallery 1 (First floor)
Free, drop-in
Join one of Towner's Visitor Engagement Team Leaders, Caitlin Yapp, for a 20-minute close look at Alexander Calder’s wire sculpture

This exhibition has been made possible as a result of the Government Indemnity Scheme. Towner would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity.