Swindon Museum and Art Gallery receives new work from acclaimed female artists

Swindon Museum and Art Gallery has substantially increased its collection of works by women artists with a number of new acquisitions.

The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) has gifted Swindon Museum and Art Gallery (SM&AG) seven works on paper by two of Britain’s most fascinating contemporary female artists, Nicola Tyson and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. A painting by the former Keeper of the Royal Academy, Eileen Cooper OBE RA, has been purchased with the generous support of the Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, and the V&A Purchase Fund. This acquisition was made possible with the assistance of the family of Eileen Cooper and Rabley Contemporary Gallery.

These most recent acquisitions will be on display from Wednesday 28 March until Saturday 14 April.

SM&AG has been a member of CAS since the 1940s and in that time they have contributed more than thirty paintings, drawings and ceramics to the Swindon Collection of Modern British Art. For these recent acquisitions, we worked closed with CAS to increase the number of contemporary female artists in our collection.

Four of the new works are drawings by Nicola Tyson. Born in London in 1960, she has been living in the United States since the late 1980s. Her work is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern in London. Swindon Museum and Art Gallery now joins this prestigious group.

The other 3 works are collages from Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s series Catpeople (2017). Chetwynd studied anthropology before becoming an artist and her work includes performance, film, painting and collage. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012 and is so far the only Turner Prize nominated female artist in Swindon’s collection. Chetwynd recently took part in the Liverpool Biennale, as well as the BBC4 series, ‘What Do Artists Do All Day?'

The purchase of Eileen Cooper’s work follows the successful 2017 exhibition ‘Hide and Seek’, held at Swindon Museum and Art Gallery in collaboration with the Royal Academy.

This purchase has been financially supported by the Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, who visited Eileen Cooper’s studio at the Royal Academy, as well as hosting a sell-out ‘in conversation’ talk with the artist in 2016.

The Friends said: “We are delighted that this vivid, beautiful and touching painting is joining our collection. Swindon previously acquired a drawing by Cooper, but this work shows her skills as a painter at an important time in her career."