Berenice Sydney - Career

Career

Berenice Sydney was included in ten group exhibitions between 1963 and 1975 and held eleven solo shows, in addition to being invited to represent Britain at the Biennale della Grafica d’Arte in Florence in 1974. The following year she showed her "stained glass effect" canvases at the McAlpine Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum.

Her first professional exhibition was held at the Drian Galleries in 1968 and included Susanna and the Elders with Charlie the Pigeon, Coffee Pot and 3 Yellow Flowers and The Drummer Boy.

She began to exhibit her works on paper including Dancing Nymphs, Hermaphroditus, Pan and Two Nymphs, The Marriage of Psyche and Eros, Naiads Surprised by Satyrs, in 1968. Linocuts were also exhibited that year and included Aphrodite and Ares, Nymphs Dancing, Psyche and Eros, Nude Fiddling with Toe, Pan and Two Nymphs and Hebe and Artemis. She continued to explore themes relating to Persian mythology, Christian symbolism and Greek mythological subjects as well as referencing Ancient Egyptian art, creating a hieroglyph of her professional name and working on papyrus.

Responding to the exhibition 'Salute to Berenice Sydney' held at the Royal Academy Max Wykes-Joyce wrote:

In the Spring of 1968 I was much charmed by a first one-person show at the Drian Galleries of large, lively paintings which evidenced the artist's interest in dance and music, and a group of black and white drawings on mythological themesm made in her late teens and very early twenties by the young self-taught Berenice Sydney. I praised them greatly: subesequently show of her work were in turn singled out for admiration in Arts Review by Marina Vaizey, Pat Gilmour, Oswell Baakeston and Charles Bone. And these praises were more recently joined by those of Kenneth Garlick of the Ashmolean Museum and David Brown of the Tate Gallery. Her painting evolved from figuration to an apparent abstraction which was, in truth, a dance of colours, an expression of natural exuberance. She was continually researching new means of printmaking and mixed media works, each kind of which is represented in this, her memorial exhibition.