Sylvia Edwards


Sylvia Anne Edwards was an American abstract artist. Edwards first exhibited her work in 1975 and went on to hold over thirty solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa during her lifetime.

Biography

Sylvia Edwards was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Junius and Sylvia Edwards. Her father was a music promoter and manager. Edwards’s future career began at home, where her mother instilled in her a love for art.
Edwards attended Massachusetts College of Art from 1954 to 1957. There, she was influenced by Lawrence Kupferman, a Modernist painter who introduced his students to the work of artists Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, and to the dynamics of cityscapes.
Edwards left college to marry an Iranian international student. They had their first daughter, Shirin, in 1958. Edwards continued her education at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts during this time. In 1960, they moved to Philadelphia, where they had their second child, Nader. The family relocated to Tehran, Iran, in 1961. In 1966, Edwards gave birth to her third child, Leila, in Southern Iran.
Edwards moved to Switzerland in 1975 before settling in London in 1977. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Modern Art Studies in London in 1980-1981. She spent summers painting in her studio on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She resided in England until her death in 2018 at Chelsea Westminster Hospital.
The biographers Mel Gooding and David Elliott chronicled her life and work in an eponymously named book Sylvia Edwards: A Monograph, released in 2002.

Art

Sylvia Edwards is an abstract watercolor painter. She was influenced by Matisse, Klee, Milton Avery, and Mark Rothko.

Solo exhibitions

Public collections