Provenance
The Artist's Estate
Note: Born in Surrey, Geddes trained at the Westminster School of Art between 1932-7 where her teachers included Walter Bayes, Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky. She became a member of the NS, AIA and the Womens' International Art Club, also showing at the RA, LG, NEAC and Redfern Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was staged at the AIA Gallery in 1950 and she went on to have two major shows at the Drian Galleries in the 1960s. Geddes's work moved from figuration to abstraction and she showed herself to be an adventurous, inquiring artist, well aware of developments on the continent and the Abstract Expressionists in America. For many years she was President of the Womens' International Art Club and she remained committed to promoting the work of avant garde women artists. Geddes visited New York several times during the early 1960s and was much influenced by the work of James Brooks, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. Reviewing an exhibition of her work in 1968, Conroy Maddox admired the maturity in her atmospheric structures and remarked, '...even though nature might supply the raw material she sifts it through memory to convert it into the essential matter of her art.' A major retrospective of her life and work was staged at the Woodlands Art Gallery in Greenwich in 1998.