Mongolian Head, also exhibited as Tarter Head, was completed while Gordine was living and working in Paris in the late 1920s. Mongolian Head is one of three works by Gordine known to have been photographed by the visual artist Man Ray.
This unusual work attempts to mimic the disfigured appearance of ancient sculpture damaged over time.
Beryl Grey (1927-2022) trained as a ballerina at Sadlers Wells (now The Royal Ballet), becoming one of its four principal ballerinas in 1953. In 1957, she became the first Western ballerina invited to dance with the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companies and danced with the Peking Ballet in 1964. Following her retirement from dancing, she […]
Gordine sculpted this self-portrait head in 1933 at her Johor Bahru studio in Malaya (now Malaysia); it was cast by Valsuani in Paris. She took an active role in all stages of the sculpture process, including the patination of the finished work. According to Maren Friedman, one of her sitters, “I know that achieving the […]
The subject of this portrait, Louis John, worked at the Hawker Hurricane aircraft factory in Kingston. The work was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1945. Local newspaper The Surrey Comet described it as a portrait of ‘a young mechanic caught in the full arrogance of youth’ (12 February 1955).
Audrey Mitchell, neé de Souza, identified herself as the sitter for this work on a visit to Dorich House in 2012. At the time of the sittings, which lasted around 6 weeks, she was working at the offices of the US Navy in London.
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