The Royal Opera Arcade Gallery is delighted to present an retrospective of paintings and drawings by the British portrait artist Julia Munsey created over the last 20 years. The exhibition reveals Munsey’s fascination in capturing the human body and movement.
Julia Munsey trained at The Slade School of Art under the tuition of Euan Uglow. After teaching at Maidstone School of Art she then trained as a Jungian psychotherapist. It was then seeing an article about the opening of the Prince’s Drawing School that Munsey re-immersed herself in the world of drawing and enrolled at the school. Munsey’s intrigue into how people present themselves is a concept that has a great force within her artwork throughout the different pathways of her career.
In order to capture the intense movement of the body, Munsey vigorously studies her subjects, often dancers or performers, as they twist and turn through space only then is it that she begins to draw as much of the body that captures her attention. The dissonance between the precise marks of the artist and the fleeting, ephemeral movements of the performing dancers manifests itself in layered, tableau-esque portraits. Multiple bodies, perspectives and lines evoke a dream-like sense where dramatic form inhabits a non-specific space. There is a balance within the work between the lessening of detail of features against the definite curves of the body.
