Professor Alexander Marr
- Head of the Department of History of Art
- Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art
- Fellow and Dean of Discipline of Trinity Hall
- Director of Studies at Gonville & Caius College
Contact
About
Alyce Mahon is the department's specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory. She studied the History of Art & Architecture and Modern English at Trinity College Dublin, graduating with a double first and gold medal for exceptional academic achievement. Awarded both Chevening and British Academy scholarships for doctoral studies she moved to London to pursue a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She received her doctorate in 1999 and took up her position at Cambridge in 2000.
Teaching and Doctoral Supervision:
At undergraduate level, Mahon teaches a Part II option The Poetics & Politics of Surrealism which addresses the long history of Surrealism (1924-69) as well as its impact on the counter-culture and its legacy in contemporary art. She convenes, and contributes lectures and seminars on modern and contemporary art to core BA papers including Part I 'Paper 1: Objects' and 'Paper 2/3: The Making of Art' , and Part IIB 'The Display of Art: The Politics of Display'. She also contributes lectures to the core, team led paper 'Approaches to the History of Art' .
At graduate level, Mahon supervises students and teaches on the team taught MPhil degree. Topics she covers include Symbolism, the livre d'artiste, Surrealist art and writing, the 'informe' in inter-war Paris, 1960s performance art and contemporary feminist art, film and photography. Dr Mahon has supervised 7 doctoral students to completion (working on aspects of American, French, British and Czech Surrealism; inter-war art in France and America; and contemporary French photography) and currently supervises 3 more. She welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in fields related to her specialisms - notably Dada, Surrealism, performance art and feminist art practice in Europe and the United States.
Research
Research and Curating:
Dr Mahon specialises on the dynamic between the body and the body politic in modern and contemporary art, photography, film and exhibition practice - from Dada, Surrealism and the Sixties counter-culture to contemporary feminist and performance art.
Mahon has been involved in numerous international exhibitions as advisor, catalogue contributor and guest curator. She is the co-curator of SADE: Freedom or Evil for the Centre de Cultura Contempoània de Barcelona (CCCB), an exhibition that that runs from May 10 to Oct 15, 2023 and explores the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade and his impact on modern and contemporary art and culture. Mahon also curated the first major retrospective of American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning for the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (Oct. 3, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019) and Tate Modern London (Feb 28 - June 9 2019).
She was also the curatorial advisor for the first retrospective exhibition of Surrealist Leonor Fini in the US, Leonor Fini: Theater of Desire, 1930-1990, for the Museum of Sex, New York (Sept. 28, 2018 - March 4, 2019). Mahon has contributed to the accompanying catalogues for, and often acted as curatorial advisor to, major exhibitions on modern and contemporary art throughout her career, especially advancing research and the profile of women of the avant-garde. These include: Maria Martins (MASP, 2021-22), Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2020), Couples Modernes 1900-1950 (Pompidou Metz, and Hayward Gallery London, 2018), Dreamers Awake (White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2017), No Place Like Home (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2017), Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 2014 & Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 2015 ), The Institute of Sexology (Wellcome Collection, London, 2014), Le Surréalisme et l’objet (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013), Leonora Carrington (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013), Matta. Fiktionen (Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg 2012), and Donna: Avanguardia femminista negli anni ’70 (Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna, Rome, 2010).
She was awarded a British Academy/ Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for 2017-2018, and has been a Distinguished Scholar for the Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Foundation's Scholars Exchange Programme with the University of Cambridge (2004), giving a series of academic and public lectures across China; a Research Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars, Reid Hall, Paris (2005); a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2006-07); and an Andrew Mellon Teaching Fellow at CRASSH, Cambridge (2009).