King Lear Painting

Born London
BA HONS St. Martins 1983-86
MA Royal Academy 1986-90

2006/7- Ten/twelve large scale paintings based on complex characters in Shakespeare's plays..
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About Elpida

SHAKESPEARE DREAMS

An Exhibition of Paintings by Elpida Georgiou

sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust and the Department of English, School of Humanities, and Insitute of Psychiatry, Kings College London


The genesis of this exhibition was a painting I made many years ago entitled Freud Acting Hamlet. I have always been interested in Freuds analyses of Shakespeares characters, not least for his misinterpretations, of Hamlet in particular. Hamlet uses drama to accuse his uncle of the murder of his father and delivers a speech on acting to the players (who surely have rather more dramatic experience than he does). Hamlet stresses that they must not overact. I saw Freud as himself an actor, on a world stage, an actor not averse to posturing, and so, in my painting, I cast Freud as Hamlet more from intuition than analysis, but thats the way I work.

Busy with other projects, and life in general, I didnt follow this up in any systematic way until I was introduced to Gordon McMullan, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Kings College London, and to Brian Hurwitz, D'Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine & the Arts. Kings prides itself on promoting interdisciplinary studies and especially in finding ways to bring together the very different disciplines of the humanities and medical science. They were fascinated by the possibility of combining three academic disciplines - painting, literature and psychoanalysis and Gordon submitted a successful application to The Leverhulme Trust for me to become artist-in-residence of the English Department. Only writers (as you might expect in the context of an English department) had held this post before, so to bring in a visual artist was a new development and very exciting. There is great competition for this prestigious award and I felt honoured to be offered the post of artist-in-residence.

I received the Leverhulme award in the same week I was made homeless. My daughter had no secondary school to go to, and I found myself before a judge at the High Court, answering charges brought by my ex-husband. This, naturally, delayed my completion of the series. I am very grateful that Kings and the Leverhulme Trust had the patience to continue supporting my project.