National Velvet

Annabel Dover, National Velvet

National Velvet meditates on the strangely intertwined lives of two young girls during the Second World War: budding young actress Elizabeth Taylor and Anne Frank, famous for the diaries she wrote in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

Twelve-year-old Taylor starred in the Hollywood film National Velvet; meanwhile Frank was cutting out magazine images of film stars and sticking them to the wall of a tiny, hidden apartment. The film was released for Christmas, 1944 – Anne Frank’s last December. This was the first oblique and conjectural encounter between the two women.

The next was in 1959, when Elizabeth Taylor was meant to play Anne Frank in George Stevens’s film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. In the end Millie Perkins was cast instead. She played Anne as an unrealistically passive and good-natured child. Anne had dreamt of a film star version of herself, and ironically Hollywood depicted her in a fantasy version of her own tragic life.

For her second solo show at Transition Gallery, Annabel Dover creates a sparse domestic space containing a series of tentatively representational paintings of Anne Frank’s wall of images alongside a series of paintings from her own family album and some very short films of incidental events. This work is part of her Dover’s ongoing examination of collecting.

National Velvet
15 January – 6 February 2011
Transition Gallery
Unit 25a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road E8 4QN

Opening times: Fri-Sun 12-6pm

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Related: Good Morning, Mr Orwell