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Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Artlyst: Leonora Carrington Still Relevant - Firstsite Colchester

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on ‘Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances’ at Firstsite Gallery:

'As is clear from this exhibition, the many visionary elements of her work, including her feminism, ecological awareness, interest in spirituality outside of organized religion, and understanding of a world without boundaries, not only result in the creation of extraordinary artistic and personal worlds but connect to key themes and challenges in contemporary society. Her cousin and friend, Joanna Moorhead, has said “The themes that were important to her, as long ago as the 1940s, are the themes that are important to all of us today – especially the natural world, our place in it, and the interconnectedness of everyone and everything.” By offering us a holistic view of Carrington’s life and work, this exhibition fully demonstrates the truth of that statement.'

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Friday, 28 June 2024

Church Times - Art review: Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine North, London

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is on Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine North, London:

'A final recent drawing And God Created Life, sums up Chicago’s belief, as described by Martha Easton, that a “united humanity” through “the blending of genders in the very body of God anticipates the reclamation of Eden and the resultant peace on earth” as envisaged at the end of Revelations. This fascinating exhibition and Chicago’s body of work challenge us to consider how we might “imagine a more equitable and inclusive world”.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Judee Sill - The Kiss.
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Friday, 3 March 2023

Church Times - Art review: Big Women at Firstsite, Colchester

My latest review for Church Times is of Big Women at Firstsite, Colchester:

'“BIG WOMEN” comes with an emphasis on the word “Big”. This is a big group show of 24 leading British women artists, each of whom is a big character in her own right. The focus is on the experience of women in later life, the show having grown out of one organised by the curator, Sarah Lucas, in 2020, which derived from discussion of the experience of becoming a Señora rather than a Señorita ...

In “times dominated by male aggression, politicking, greed, war and pig-headedness”, Lucas suggests that we need the mix of seriousness and humour, thoughtfulness and light-heartedness, brashness and sensitivity, and spirituality and humanism which characterises this exhibition.'

For more on Big Women, see my Artlyst diary for February - click here. 

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here. See also Modern religious art: airbrushed from art history?.

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Aretha Franklin - Respect.
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Wednesday, 31 August 2022

Artlyst - Hidden Depths: The Woman in the Window – Dulwich Picture Gallery

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on 'Reframed: The Woman in the Window' at Dulwich Picture Gallery:

‘It’s such a simple motif – a woman at or by a window – yet, as curator Jennifer Sliwka ably demonstrates in this show, is one that contains hidden depths. This exhibition concisely and clearly maps out the history of this motif, shows us several specific foci of its use over the centuries, while also exploring the extent to which this has been a motif of male artists reflecting the male gaze, before then highlighting ways in which female artists have subverted, used and critiqued the motif.

It is a significant achievement on Sliwka’s part to navigate across so much contested ground with such care and consideration, while delivering an exhibition that never fails to engage visually as well as intellectually. Alongside her consideration of the ‘woman in the window’ motif are also reflections on the nature of windows; not simply openings in walls but, as Sliwka notes, charged thresholds, sites of observation or communication, and signifiers of wealth or spiritual meaning. The layers of meaning explored in this exhibition are, as a result, significant and deep.

The exhibition identifies the key geographic locations, cultures and time periods for which the motif had a particular meaning and what this reveals about issues of gender and visibility. As such, it is instructive to view the exhibition alongside Feminine power: the divine to the demonic at the British Museum, which explores the representation of feminine power or desire in material form. In both, no simple answers are proffered to the issues raised but there is a wealth of imagery and ideas shared with which to engage.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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The Innocence Mission - Look Out From Your Window.
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Thursday, 9 June 2022

Paula Rego: Secrets of Faith

The last exhibition held within the lifetime of Paula Rego, who died yesterday, is Secrets of Faith, an exhibition in Venice organised by Victoria Miro and open until 18 June.

"Completed in 2002, the works on view depict episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary – subjects familiar in Christian art radically retold by Rego that are among the most special to the artist. ‘Of all my pictures, these were the most fun to make,’ Rego has said, and their importance can be measured by the fact that many have remained in her own collection; for years she kept one work from the cycle, Descent from the Cross, on her bedroom wall.

During his presidency of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio (1939–2021), who Rego had known as a lawyer since the 1960s and who, during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, came up with the slogan ‘Always 25 April’, invited the artist to create a series for the chapel of the Palácio de Belém, the head of state’s official residence in Lisbon. In response, Rego made Nossa Senhora, tackling Mary’s story with a curiosity and passion that resulted far in excess of the eight works which were eventually installed in the chapel.

This exhibition features additional works from the cycle and a number of related watercolours that reveal Rego’s thought processes as she depicts Mary viewed from the lived experience of women – embracing the Virgin’s iconography while unseating serene and ethereal depictions from art history, finding the most pertinent parts of the story and dramatising them in ways that speak beyond the traditional narrative. Rego’s challenge in telling the story not just from the Virgin’s perspective but from the position of an embodied female figure is one that drew on her knowledge of the Old Masters, Christian art and religious texts, as well as her own experience of flesh and faith. She deals with episodes of pain and pleasure, astonishment and fear, through the prism of her own, deeply personal life experiences – pregnancy at a young age, motherhood, the burden of grief. Of her belief in God, Rego has said, ‘I think it is because I am Portuguese and because I love stories, and Christianity is a very good story.’

Rego’s work, always defiantly unsentimental, here places centre stage the earthly body, subjected to forces that are viscerally felt. In Annunciation we see Mary, modelled by the artist’s granddaughter, as a girl in school uniform, her head tilted back in a kind of rapture before the Angel who proffers a bunch of phallic calla lilies; an unmistakably physical interjection to the narrative of the immaculate conception. Mary remains a child, as does Christ, in a number of watercolours depicting the Pietá, their youth serving to heighten a sense of their vulnerability. In Descent from the Cross, a work that Rego connects most strongly to the death of her husband, Victor Willing, in 1988, the composition accentuates the weight of the body being taken down. In Agony in the Garden, while the angel is curled over in anguish, Mary, consumed by grief, turns away.

The feminism implicit in telling Mary’s story in ways it hadn’t been before is intertwined with Rego’s relationship with faith and her formative experiences under the Salazar dictatorship in a deeply Catholic country where the most proscriptive aspects of religion were felt most acutely by women. While the story may be thousands of years old, these scenes of Mary’s life are entirely of a piece with Rego’s work and the wider forces of suffering and survival, agency and resolve addressed consistently throughout the seven decades of her career."

Maria Manuel Lisboa writes that "Rego’s past work, from its very earliest productions, had often visited religious themes or formats (in the case of the latter, for example, triptychs) in trademark iconoclastic manner: Annunciation, Joseph’s Dream, Deposition, Up the Tree (the latter, whether intentionally or not, a crucified female figure), to name but a few. In the late 1990s she created a series of drawings and pastels inspired by Eça de Queirós’s well-known anti-clerical nineteenth-century novel, The Crime of Father Amaro as well as a series on the theme of abortion which, provocatively, included a triptych, a format more habitually associated with religious art and particularly with altar pieces."

The following artist’s quotes below relate to the themes of the exhibition and are taken from an interview with Richard Zimler, April 2003, published in full here, and from Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories, the 2017 feature documentary directed by the artist’s son, filmmaker Nick Willing:
  • ‘It is about Mary, not about Christ. The story celebrates her – her in her own right.’ 
  • ‘It’s actually what’s in the book, only there’s a meeting between what’s in the story and my experience.’ 
  • ‘What makes it transcendent, in fact, is its human qualities, and that’s what I find moving about it.’ 
  • ‘Jesus was a man and Mary was a woman giving birth… They are people! They don’t come from outer space. They are flesh and blood.’
  • ‘The model for the young Mary was my granddaughter. In Michelangelo’s Pietà she is also a girl. Here, she’s holding a very young boy… By having young figures – even children – their vulnerability becomes much more.’ 
Secrets of Faith is not the first Rego exhibition focused on her religious work. Paula Rego/Josefa de Óbidos: religious art in the feminine was at Casa das Histórias Paula Rego from December 2020 - September 2021. This exhibition showed Rego’s religiously inspired works — alongside those of 17th-century Portugeuse artist Josefa de Óbidos. Both artists explored Catholicism and its mysteries, shared an intense sensualist charge which they both imprinted on painting, and also an imaginative ability to reconfigure religious themes.

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Roxanna Panufnik - Three Paths To Peace.
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Sunday, 6 August 2017

Modern Art Oxford: Rose Finn-Kelcey

Last week I visited Modern Art Oxford to see Life, Belief and Beyond, the first posthumous exhibition of works by the highly acclaimed and influential artist Rose Finn-Kelcey (1945–2014). 'Life, Belief and Beyond focuses on Finn-Kelcey’s explorations of power, performance, political commentary, and perceptions of the self, belief and spirituality.

The exhibition presents works from the early 1970s to 2014, including Divided Self (Speaker’s Corner), 1974; The Restless Image: a discrepancy between the seen position and the felt position, 1975; Glory, 1983; Bureau de Change, 1987; and It Pays to Pray, 1999. These examples of Finn-Kelcey’s diverse and exacting practice are presented alongside photographs, collage, performance documentation, sketches in progress and preparatory material – never before exhibited.

Finn-Kelcey’s work is conceptually powerful, profound and is characterised by a dry wit that belies the formidable intelligence and deep humanity that drove her practice. A central figure in the performance and feminist art scene in Britain for over four decades, her work is intimately concerned with social dialogue, populism, activism, and how these tools of communication intersect with complex systems of power.

Finn-Kelcey’s far-reaching influence on conceptual art in the 1970s and ‘80s extended locally, to the generation of YBAs (Young British Artists) in the ’90s as she began to realise large-scale and technically complex installations.

Avant-garde in her ideas both in art and politics, Finn-Kelcey’s endlessly inventive practice demonstrates the artist’s interest in creating socio-political statements with a visually arresting quality, often object-based, frequently combining her creative investigations with contemporary technologies.'

'Since her death, Finn-Kelcey’s work has been the subject of increasing attention, as the themes she was concerned with have re-entered the public consciousness: feminism, spirituality, commodity culture and individual empowerment, to name a few.'

'Life, Belief and Beyond is a celebration of Finn-Kelcey’s work and pays tribute to her extraordinary practice and influence.'

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Squeeze - Labelled With Love.
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