Review by James Eagle - The Morning Star 21 November 2003

James Eagle finds a voice of hope among the images of despair at a new London exhibition.

 The True Faces of War.

Exhibition preview

Frances Newman: A World at War The Millinery Works, London

From next week, the Millinery Works gallery in Islington will be hosting an exhibition of the work of Frances Newman.

Newman, a London-based painter and sculptor, strives to restore the human element to the victims of war, social deprivation and hard-line anti immigration policies, giving a face to those so often portrayed as faceless victims.

Her genius is in her ability, in painting a single second of a single person’s existence, to evoke the huge overwhelming social forces behind that moment of individual misery or joy.

In ‘Freedom From Tyranny 1’, a single Middle Eastern man, stooping under the weight of sorrow, carries the bloodstained body of a child while the needle-sleek shape of a jet bomber sweeps across the sky behind him.

An immigrant woman stands at a bus stop in ‘The War at Home’, a baby in one arm, her scared child clutching her leg while she pleadingly stretches out her hand for spare change.

There is hope here – a passer-by is fumbling in his pocket for coins – but it is undermined by a newspaper billboard in the background reading: “Judge declares war on refugee women.”

‘The Lost Generation Who Died Protecting the Rights of the Patent Holders’ depicts an African couple in front of their decrepit shack, surrounded by their eight emaciated and raggedly dressed children.

 But, despite poverty and starvation, they stand tall, proud and defiant.

Newman fits squarely in the British tradition of social – and socialist – realism. Her work cuts through Orwellian double-speak and media distortion, tearing down our misconceptions to ram home the human cost of the phrases that we toss about so blithely – “zero tolerance”, “police action,” “economic migrant.”

She is the often overlooked voice of all our consciences, more needed than ever during this never-ending “war on terror.”

Runs from December 3-21

Work illustrated with review: ‘The War at Home’ (Click on small image below to see enlarge)

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