LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Imperial War Museum presents today “Ravilious: Imagined Realities,” on view through January 25, 2004. This exhibition, celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth, will bring together all aspects of Ravilious’s work as a painter and designer, culminating in his outstanding work as an official war artist in the Second World War.

During a short career, Eric Ravilious (1903 - 1942) produced paintings and designs that revitalized long-established traditions and reformulated national icons. In a major retrospective, to celebrate the centenary of his birth, the Imperial War Museum London presents the largest ever display of his work, including over one hundred of Ravilious’s water-colours, mural designs, woodcuts, book illustrations, ceramics, furniture and glassware. The exhibition includes works from private collections, rarely seen in public, as well as those from national collections, and, for the first time ever, his chalk figure paintings will be shown together.

Ravilious’s paintings drew on the rich tradition of British water-colourists but sought to go behind the received academic tradition to identify magical qualities in images and objects. His imagery, hovering between abstraction and realism, looks for alternative ways of representing the familiar: landscapes and interiors distilled to disturbing simplicity. His work as an official war artist has a powerful if understated feeling of the accidental beauty of military equipment and the emotional tension that it can produce.

The wood engravings and book designs explore worlds, in narrative images as well as emblematic motifs, that are at times both disturbing and dramatic. For Wedgwood, Ravilious demonstrated his ability to fit image to design. He was a leading light in the Art and Industry movement of the inter-war period that was committed to combining ’fine’ and ’applied’ arts.

The exhibition will culminate with his outstanding work as an official war artist, in the pursuit of which he was tragically killed in September 1942, when he went on an air-sea rescue mission and failed to return.