Searching for Berenice: Berenice Sydney

Berenice described her work as catching "the contained energy of colour, a split second before the explosion." In the annals of art history, the name Berenice Sydney (1944–1983) has fallen unusually quiet. In her lifetime she exhibited across the UK, Europe and the Americas, represented Great Britain at the 1974 Biennale della Grafica d'Arte in Florence, and saw her work enter more than a hundred collections, including Tate, the British Museum, the Smithsonian and the Gallerie degli Uffizi. Yet after her death at thirty-eight, the critical conversation around her work receded within a generation, reflecting a wider pattern in how the reputations of women artists are preserved. 'Searching for Berenice' is as much an act of recovery as it is a retrospective. Across painting, printmaking, brush drawing, papyrus, costume and an illustrated book, the exhibition reconstructs a practice spanning 1966 to 1983. It follows Berenice's own division of her work into colour and line: painting as colour with a personality of its own, graphic work as line approaching handwriting and inscription. The exhibition unveils an artist who never separated seriousness from wit, or the studio from the stage. It is accompanied by the first comprehensive catalogue of her work. Together, they offer the most sustained account the surviving material allows, and argue for Berenice's rightful place in art history.