Anthea Alley

Biography

Anthea Alley’s first one-person show opened in 1960 at the Molton Gallery in London. She was thirty-three, and by then people were already talking about her as a young British sculptor.

She was born on 5 January 1927 in Seremban, in Malaya, into the Oswell family, and at birth was named Anthea Priscilla Frederica Oswell. The family spent the Second World War years in Australia and South Africa. In 1944 they moved to London. There she studied painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic, then at Chelsea College of Art and at the Royal College of Art. For several years she taught at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. She did not give up teaching later: in her biography it stands beside painting and sculpture. Alley began as a painter. Her early abstract works are described as brutalist: everyday materials went into them, not just paint. She never trained as a sculptor and learned the craft on her own. By the end of the 1950s she was regarded as a notable young British sculptor. From 1957 she took up sculpture in earnest, making welded pieces and, alongside them, assemblage paintings, in which three-dimensional objects were joined to the flat surface of the canvas. Which materials and forms predominated in individual works is hard to tell, and I would judge that cautiously until exhibition catalogues have been looked through.

The Molton Gallery show took place in 1960, and in 1961 Alley won a John Moores Painting Prize. The prize, awarded at a competitive exhibition in Liverpool, came to her just when sculpture had become her main occupation.

Her husband, Ronald Alley, was an art historian and Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery.

Anthea Alley died in London on 9 October 1993. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery, the Arts Council and Birmingham Art Gallery.