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Magda Cordell Mchale Biography
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Born in Hungary, the artist married Frank Cordell, musical director of EMI. She was a regular figure at the newly formed Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and a founding member of The Independent Group. The Independent Group, or the IG, as it was called, is best known for having launched Pop Art. But the young artists, architects, and critics who met informally at London's ICA in the early 1950s were actually embarked on a far more subversive and constructive mission than the founding of an art movement. Street-smart, anti-academic, and iconoclastic, they embraced Hollywood and Madison Avenue and rejected the traditional dichotomies between high and low culture, British and American values. They used their meetings and exhibitions to challenge the official modernist assumptions of British aesthetics and to advocate instead a media-based, consumer-based aesthetics of change and inclusiveness - an aesthetics of plenty. In doing so they drew upon Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist strategies to invigorate their alternative version of modernism - a version that today can be said to have insinuated the terms of postmodernism.
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Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Cordell explored her interest in the creative processes and bodily iconography in a series of large-scale, monumental paintings and mixed-media monoprints. Rayner Banham included a photograph of 'Figure' (1955) in his article 'The New Brutalism' in Architectural Review (Dec 1955), alongside work by Nigel Henrderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and the Smithsons.
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Cordell held an exhibition of her monotypes and collages at the ICA in 1955 and of her paintings at Hanover Gallery, London, in 1956. She collaborated with Richard Hamilton and John McHale in 'This is Tomorrow' at the Whitchapel Art Gallery, London, in 1956. Cordell later married John McHale and they both moved to America in 1961.
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Cordell was created Professor Emeritus, University of Buffalo, USA, and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and her work is held in several major public collections, including the Tate Gallery, London and Albright-Knox, Buffalo, New York.
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