Spontaneous Generation; Drawing after M Milner
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytic Association
Description
Online via Zoom
Spontaneous Generation; Drawing after Marion Milner
Mathew Hale & Rye Dag Holmboe
Abstract:
From 1990 until her death in 1998, Mathew Hale worked as Marion Milner’s assistant, transcribing her manuscripts. Milner, then in her nineties, was one of Britain’s most influential psychoanalysts, renowned for her longstanding interest in the creative process. Over those eight years, Hale and Milner developed a close friendship. Her ideas, particularly her method of ‘free drawing’, had a lasting impact on his thinking and practice. After her death, Hale shot a super-8 film capturing the interior of her consulting room, which will be screened here for the first time. Following the screening, Rye Dag Holmboe will present a paper on FACTS OF LIFE, a recent series of drawings by Hale, partly inspired by Milner’s work. The event will conclude with a conversation between Hale and Holmboe, reflecting on drawing in the wake of Milner—and beyond.
Biography
Mathew Hale is a visual artist who also writes and curates. Based in Berlin and Los Angeles, Hale has presented solo exhibitions in both of those cities, as well as in Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, Melbourne, and Kitakyushu, Japan, where he was the recipient of the CCA Artists’ Residency. He has also participated in many group shows. Hale works in a wide variety of media, making paintings, sculptures, installations, collages, and drawings, as well as photographic slide-dissolve works that incorporate sound. He has a particular interest in the practice of ‘free drawing’, as theorized by Marion Milner in her book On Not Being Able to Paint. He worked as Milner’s assistant for the last eight years of her life. Hale has written catalogue essays on the work of the artists Rodney Graham, Ceal Floyer, Julie Mehretu, and Matt Saunders. He also wrote the main text for the catalogue of the group show The Youngest Day that he curated, presenting the work of twenty-four Los Angeles based artists in Berlin. Hale is currently preparing two books for publication later this year: FACTS OF LIFE and One Silver Dollar Paintings Archive, with X Artists’ Books, Los Angeles.
Rye Dag Holmboe is a psychoanalyst, art historian, writer, and curator. He is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytic Association. He works in private practice and as a psychotherapist at the Camden Psychotherapy Unit, a community mental health charity. Holmboe holds a PhD in the History of Art from University College London, where he was an AHRC Doctoral Scholar and later a Teaching Fellow. He is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Art History at the University of East Anglia, where he was formerly Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. Holmboe has published, lectured, and taught widely on art, literature, and psychoanalysis. His biography of the painter Howard Hodgkin will be published by Yale University Press in 2026, to coincide with a retrospective of Hodgkin’s work he is curating at the Pallant House Gallery. Holmboe is Vice President and Secretary of the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, and a Trustee of Flat Time House, an art gallery in South London.
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