Un Oeuf Is Un Oeuf At TJ Boulting: A Cracking Exhibition

It’s not every Tuesday that I find myself in a line in Fitzrovia, two eggs in hand, waiting to hurl them against a wall. 

There is something deeply satisfying in this simple act, the yellow yolk sliding slowly, thickly, down a pristine white wall. My eggs – free range from younger chickens whose eggs are smaller in size and typically rejected by supermarkets – were two in a thousand, the final shell smacking against the wall sealing a performance artwork by British multidisciplinary artist Sarah Lucas.

This isn’t the first time Lucas has invited women and people who identify as women (although when I visited, there was also an important male collector awaiting his turn, who just wanted to be part of the action) to cast eggs into her abstract canvas. Her 1000 Eggs: For Women has been created in New Museum in New York; the Hammer Museum in LA; the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing; and Kurimanzutto in Mexico City. This is its first iteration in London.

It forms the centrepiece of Un Oeuf is Un Oeuf, a new selling exhibition at T J Boulting gallery, where myriad artists take its symbolism and mythology as their subject in mediums from painting and sculpture to photography and performance, sometimes playfully, often poignantly. 

For Lucas, who has taken the egg as a motif before – in photographic self-portraits, for example, and incorporating real fried eggs into her sculpture – the egg throwing is both reference to the traditional medium of tempera and a symbol of women’s fertility and reproduction, partly in protest against the control of women bodies.

DANIELLE FRETWELL
Mourning After
2024
Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Alice Amati

Elsewhere in the exhibition, pieces include a beautiful oil on canvas by Boston artist Danielle Fretwell, the seemingly traditional, quiet still life entitled Mourning After, inviting contemplation on a woman’s right to choose as the US gears up for election, alongside notions of motherhood and loss.

Gareth Cadwallader’s Dali-esque watercolour of his pregnant partner sees her curled up beneath a protective canopy of egg-topped plants. Boo Saville’s monochrome biro on paper of an egg sitting in a ceramic artichoke feels a beautiful and conservative foil to the slightly trippy psychedelic images by British photographer Maisie Cousins, who harnesses AI to create images drenched in colour with the egg taking centre stage as disco ball. 

Photographs include a Man Ray black and white ostrich egg taken in the 1940s, appearing like the surface of the moon, and Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino’s black and white photograph of an egg, poised teasingly at the top of the stairs. A recurring motif in her work since the 1970s, the fragile egg is placed in pedestrian and everyday scenes, its vulnerability speaking to the oppression of women and her censorship as a female artist in the Brazilian dictatorship between the 1960s and mid-1980s.

Amidst everything sits a single fried egg – carved in marble – and placed on a plinth, by British-Iranian sculptor Roya Bahram, a contrast to the long ceramic green snake, egg in its jaws, by Katy Stubbs, injecting the space with her trademark humour.

If you want to catch this thoughtful and charming exhibition, get cracking. It closes on 16 November.

BOOK IT

Un Oeuf is Un Oeuf runs until 16 November at T J Boulting (59 Riding House St, London W1W 7EG). Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am–6pm, and entry is free. tjboulting.com