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THE FEMALE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART: LOIE HOLLOWELL, SARA ANSTIS AND EMILY MAE SMITH

“Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt off. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” This quote from John Berger’s ‘Ways Of Seeing’ suggests that women are never just themselves, they are always performing. How can she ever be truly naked if she is constantly positioned and posed in the mould of feminine expectations?

“Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt off. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
John Berger

‍The depiction of the female subject matter in art has historically been reserved for these assumptions. This has implied their passivity, weakness and domestic purpose, restricting them to an object of observation, or what Laura Mulvey famously called “the male gaze.” As women were relegated to the domestic sphere and excluded from the modern era’s developing academic institutions in the fields of science, art and philosophy, they were excluded from research, defining what questions should be asked and thus the production of knowledge. Take for example, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory which proposed that infant males saw the female as a castrated version of themselves, envious of the penis they are lacking. Therefore, the philosophical knowledge that is rooted in society immediately overlooks the female body in favour of masculine bias and up until now this formed the basis for the representation of gender in art. This can be seen in the repetition of lounging female nudes for the pleasure of a male viewer in conflict with the heroic male figures and phallic symbols in art history.

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Between the 1960s and the 1980s, second wave feminism bought with it the proposition of new ways of thinking about science and culture and with this, new depictions of feminity arose. Whereas in the 1920s women were concerned with getting the vote, feminists now sought to locate the cause of women’s oppression and during this time they fought for their portrayal in society. They wanted equal image, equal representation, equal pay and equal opportunity. Propelled by Linda Nochlin’s provocative essay, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) a new generation of artists arose. For example, Barbara Kruger’s graphic imagery sought to reverse the resounding slogans of a male-dominated society. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, a series of staged portraits of the artist herself, in the guise of a variety of stereotypical female movie characters mimicked the cliches of female roles in Hollywood and critiqued the representation of women in the media. In the realm of performance art, Carolee Schneemann reclaimed the vaginas sacridity as a passage of life by drawing a scroll out of it on stage. Yoko Ono invited an audience to cut her clothes off her body during a performance where she sat submissively on a stage. The artists of this era were on a mission to reclaim the female body and the rising of unprecedented female perspective paved the way for the female as art creator and not just subject.

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Second wave feminism had broken the gendered constraints of expectation. This enabled the fetishization of body parts in painting through a new lens, the female gaze. Today we see a host of artists representing the female form in contrasting and exciting ways. Some are desexualising the female form and others are overtly celebrating the female bodily landscape in abstract and figurative painting. Through the contrast of sex positivity and negativity, there is one reoccurring theme and that is the choice of women depicting and choosing the light they want their body to be recognised in.

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Loie Hollowell

B. 1983, American.

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, Northern California) said, in conversation with Katy Hessel (on The Great Women Artists podcast), that her work is about breaking her own experiences with her body into geometric forms and using the canvas as a landscape to situate these experiences she has. She became a painter as a reaction against having grown up watching her father, a traditional painter, depict her mother in the nude as his muse. Leading on from this she had to think about new ways which broke free from old traditions in how she wanted to portray her own truthful naked body as both artist and model. Hollowell’s psychedelic and enigmatic shapes are autobiographical and represent her own experience of womanhood. This includes a dated series, documenting her pregnancy with her daughter Juniper, through penetrating shapes and visceral lines describing pain and feeling. In further conversation with Hessel, she described how after her birth when the midwifes cut open her placenta and unfolded “this flowery, growing organism” she “had no idea there was something that beautiful inside the whole time.” The shakey vessels mimicked the lines she had drawn in the moments prior to her birth. Through penetrating shapes, line and colour her work transports you on a corporeal journey of female experience. Hollowell takes a specific interest in the cropped interior view of flowers painted by Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986.) Although O’Keefe was not a self-proclaimed feminist, her work is thought to have been very ahead of her time for evoking the theme of female genitilia in the 1920s. O’Keefe herself denied this and it was mostly male art critics at the time, fuelled by the provocative pictures her husband Alfred Stieglitz had exhibited of her, who suggested her images referenced sexuality. The nod to O’Keefe’s work makes Hollowell’s abstract visual descriptions all the more profound as she grapples with a previously taboo subject matter that is so universal to the bodily experience. Therefore, we can appreciate her work as an ode to femininity and an elaboration of the previous restraints potentially felt by O’Keefe.

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Emily Mae Smith

B. 1979, American.

Emily Mae Smith (b. 1979, Texas) elaborates the theme of her own experience in a very different approach. She offers a critique of our gendered society through surreal oil paintings charged with historical references and anxiety. Her work does not abide to a singular style, instead borrowing elements from Surrealism, Pop Art, and Symbolism to aid the images she constructs. This involves personifying objects ripe with eroticism and societal connotations. Take for example, the motif of the phallic-like broomstick referencing Walt Disney’s 1940 Fantasia film in the pose of Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. Her works, such as The Field, The Gleaner and Me, 2021, embrace the third wave of feminism through the fluidity of the subjects which lack gender identity in their socio-political commentary.

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Sara Anstis

B. 1991, Swedish – Canadian.

In contrast to Mae Smith’s work which draws from the past in a critique of a now, Sara Antis’ (b. 1991, Stockholm) soft pastel paintings anticipate female fantasy worlds. Her blurred abstract figures celebrate the naked body and often appear as hybridized figures lounging around surreal landscapes. Her paintings explicitly worship the female gender with a reoccurring theme of water. In conversation with Emma Grayson (Art of Choice), Antis says “Sea creatures are so other-worldly that they have been mistaken for women. The characters I paint are increasingly of the water: they have slick, smooth skin, the way you’d think a dolphin’s skin would feel.”

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“Sea creatures are so other-worldly that they have been mistaken for women. The characters I paint are increasingly of the water: they have slick, smooth skin, the way you’d think a dolphin’s skin would feel.”
Sara Anstis

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In the past the notion of womanhood, feminity and birth had been defined by an importance of fertility, domestic values, and specific male needs. However, these artists are creating painting for females to read and associate with opposed to a display of gendered values tied up with societal expectations. They return sacridity to female genitilia and female experience in an ode to the past, present and future.

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The (In)Tangible Beauty of Donna Huanca’s Performances

The celebrated artist Donna Huanca (b.1980) has received a lot of attention lately due to her enigmatic paintings.

In 2019, she had two solo shows in Los Angeles and Copenhagen; she participated in numerous group exhibitions and her large-scale paintings were acquired by the most reputable institutions and public collections around the world. More recently, Simon Lee inaugurated the artist’s first solo exhibition at its London gallery, conceived as an immersive environment within the confines of the space.

But behind the beauty and frenzy of her characteristic paintings, there is a unique process which departs and nurtures itself from the traditionally intangible mystic of performance art, which in the case of Huanca, concludes with the production of these hypnotic, tangible works of art, resembling something between the aftermath of an acid rave and the spiritual ceremony of an ancient ritual.

Starting with performance art, Donna Huanca creates scenic and immersive environments populated with paintings and sculptures that echo the painted bodies of her women performers, celebrating the naked female form. Working across a variety of mediums – photography, painting, sculpture and performance – Huanca conjures these spirited environments where her audience can completely immerse in its discovery. At the core of Huanca’s practice, there is the female body, which becomes the origin of the artistic process and ultimately results in the creation of these environments and hybrid works of art.

Huanca paints the bodies of her models and later takes inspiration from them to create her fascinating paintings. Every element that is displayed in the space has been created for the performers. The paintings echo the bodies’ compositions, the sculptures are positioned in a way that they become a shelter where the performers can seek refuge. The sound has the function of helping her models keeping the pace while moving across the space, while the scent is there to make them feel relaxed and at ease.

 During Donna Huanca’s performances, pictures are taken so that the artist can create collages which are later used as the starting point to compose her paintings. Thus, every performance documentation becomes the ground for new work. Huanca is not the first artist to create paintings by using real-life bodies. After Yves Klein’s Anthropometry events in 1960, using bodies as a medium for paintings has become a common practice in contemporary art.

However, while for Klein the performers were “living brushes” for Donna Huanca they are “living paintings.” This small but radical shift in mentality shows that for her the female body is not only the medium employed to produce a painting but is the main subject. Moreover, although the female body is absolutely central to Huanca’s art, the artist is more concerned with the idea of the body as an alternative surface or medium than she is with body politics. In this way, Huanca deconstructs and fragments the bodies of her performers, to recycle them into a genderless, post-human stratagem that is no longer limited by interpretations of identity.

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Moreover, the artist has confessed that live performances in her environments are gradually becoming rarer. At the newly opened exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery in London, Wet Slit, not only were no performances scheduled, but instead, the artist invited a model to rub her body against the wall when the exhibition had still not yet opened to the public.

In this way, the audience is denied seeing the action and is left solely with traces of the body. The stains on the wall, the sculptures and paintings become the only way through which the audience can envision the body and thus the main focus of the exhibition. However, the colours, shapes and materials employed by the artist are so lively that looking at the large canvases and sculptures is like starring at the female bodies that once inhabited the space. Perhaps, the exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery is the beginning of an artistic evolution for Donna Huanca for which tangible and intangible will be so remarkably separated that performances will only happen when no one is looking. If that was to happen the permanent elements will not only become the only elements the public can see and experience, but also the only proof that a body was present in the space at all.

STATES OF UNDRESS: NUDE PAINTINGS IN CORPO E MENTE

“The nude is not the naked. It is a conventional product, the result of thousands of years of conscious and unconscious effort and much hard thinking”
Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History (1950)

The naked body has captivated artists and fascinated audiences for centuries. To the Greeks and Romans, the male nude was a symbol of the physical perfection that the human body was capable of achieving. The ancestry of the female nude however, is distinct from the male. Where the latter originates in the perfect human athlete, the former embodies the divinity of procreation, imagined as life-giving and seductive.

The nudes of ancient Greece and Rome became normative in later Western art, with their conceptually perfected bodies: each one a vision of health, youth and beauty. This Greco-Roman nudes and the legacy they left behind express profound admiration for the body as the shape of humanity, yet they do not celebrate human variety; they may have sex appeal, yet they are never totally prurient in intent.

This emphasis on idealisation derives to an essential issue: seductive and appealing as Greco-Roman nudes in art may be, they were meant to stir the mind as well as the passions, rather than effectively portray the perfectly natural, humble conditions of the states of undress present in everyday human life, from birth to the bath.

With this in mind, Corpo e Mente brings together five artists who have challenged the traditional view of the nude to explore the attitude of the time in which they were created; where the portrayal of the naked human body is either about female objectification or male heroism, ideals still very present in today’s cultural landscape, or a critique of them. From the seductive, heteronormative nude of Tom Wesselmann, to the intimate tenderness of George Rouy’s homosexual couple, to the violent and provocative qualities in Claire Tabouret’s painting or the fragility of Georg Baselitz’s ghostly naked man; Corpo e Mente offers an unbridled vision of the nude through which to contemplate on further topics rather than just perform an act of artistic voyeurism.

Tom Wesselmann

Study for Bedroom Painting #2, 1968

Tom Wesselmann’s seminal Great American Nude series effectively propelled the artist to the forefront of the American Pop art movement of the 1960s, setting him apart from fellow Pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein, whilst helping to shape his distinct, artistic identity. The works embody a combination of dense cultural critique and crude artistic expression—intellectually stimulating and visually captivating. With this series, Wesselmann implemented the vibrant colours and commercial imagery of Pop art to revisit and rework the timeless subject of the female nude.

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Study for Bedroom Painting #2, 1968 is a great example of these explorations and recalls the sultry, odalisque women frequently featured in the works of 20th century artists like Willem de Kooning and Henri Matisse, both of whom Wesselmann greatly admired.

The painting showcases the artist’s unique ability to simultaneously critique and celebrate American society in the 1960s, exploring and exposing the allegory of the American Dream. During a time when artists were growing increasingly upset by the manner in which conformity and mass consumption had come to define the American identity, Wesselmann embraced these forms in his work. He controversially unveils the parallels between recognised examples of fine art and the widely consumed, frequently reproduced images of mass media.

Borrowing from a wide range of sources—the 19th Century European Salon, the post-Impressionist landscapes of Arles and the emerging, iconic imagery from mid-20th century America—Wesselmann created the possibility for fresh meanings and new conversations. Full of irony, his nude paintings candidly challenge the conception of high art in America, forever impacting the trajectory of American Pop art.

Georg Baselitz

Andiamo, la porta è aperta, 2016

Andiamo, la porta è aperta, 2016 presents an elusive self-portrait that focuses on the human body yet makes that body difficult to approach or perceive. This reference to the self, combined with the artist’s confrontation towards the very limits of colour, material, and composition produces an ever-expanding work in dialogue with precedents, including his own. Drips of paint create a tangled vascular system for a ghostly, even weightless, figure. Its milky-white, partly translucent body oozes down the canvas, the head already beyond the edge.

In 1969, seeking to free painting from the constraint of immediate comparison to reality, Baselitz began creating compositions that appear first as abstractions, but slowly resolve as representational works. More than four decades later, he continues to seek atmospheric effects that impart to the viewer the sensation of peering through a vaporous void to discover ambiguous bodies within. Made after the Avignon paintings featured in the 2015 Biennale di Venezia -a series of eight towering vertical canvases, each containing a single visceral figure- Andiamo, la porta è aperta, 2016, with the intentionally obscured use of colour, conveys the sense of the body through the materiality of paint.

“This idea of “looking toward the future” is nonsense. I realized that simply going backwards is better. You stand in the rear of the train—looking at the tracks flying back below—or you stand at the stern of a boat and look back—looking back at what’s gone.”
Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz has had a profound influence on international art since 1960 and is indisputably one of the most important artists of our time. He shaped a new identity for German art in the second half of the 20th century; in reaction to the trauma and tragedy of the Second World War, he developed an artistic vocabulary which draws on the work of his forebears, whilst remaining unique and wholly individualistic.

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George Rouy

Smear, 2021

George Rouy’s fleshy nudes, often painted in pink, blue, or muted earth tones—bulge and blur against abstract backgrounds. While the U.K. born artist has cited 15th-century painters including Jean Fouquet and Rogier van der Weyden as influences, his work is decidedly contemporary: Rouy’s compositions evoke both soft-focus camera lenses and digital glitches.

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Sincerity comes up a lot when Rouy speaks about his art. Working mostly in figurative painting, the 24-year-old is interested in making work that has “a human aspect, a kind of emotion, a softness.” Knowing this changes the way you look at Rouy’s paintings of tubular figures that bend and flex across his large-scale canvases. In their exaggerated curves, his stretchy pink-toned figures could resemble the generous, rounded shapes of, say, Picasso’s neoclassical period, but really, Rouy is much more concerned about making work that produces a feeling, and one that’s extremely personal.

While he’s definitely interested in how other people respond to his work, ultimately the purpose of his painting lies in a personal – albeit ambiguous – representation of his relationships with other people and to himself. “I think at the moment I can only refer to myself and my own feelings about certain things,” reveals Rouy. “What I found by doing that though is that someone else can relate – it has an impact that way.”

When asked about why he thinks people have such a strong connection to his work, he responds with candour:

“You know what? I’ve no idea. I don’t really care too much. I think there’s an honesty and sincerity – I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it because I really love it. If it resonates with people to a certain extent, I try and maintain that sense of sincerity.”
George Rouy

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Claire Tabouret

Born in Mirrors, 2018

Claire Tabouret’s painting Born in Mirrors, 2018 is permeated by a certain violence: bodies in search of a stability that they don’t seem to be able to get hold of unless through domination. The vehemence of the body language is also that of the painting itself. The drawn silhouettes contrast with a barely painted and discoloured background.

In her previous group scenes it is already possible to perceive an underlying anxiety, made real by the way in which the characters sometimes find themselves tied up and muddled by their clothes, their hair. In Born in Mirrors, 2018 it is the bodies themselves that come together, even joining in the paint itself at places, where we see the paintbrush move from one to the next. Here too the question of individualisation is at stake, but in relation to the couple. The artist likes to recall Oscar Wilde’s question to the effect that when two are one, which one?

In her painting Born in Mirrors, 2018, however, the bodies embrace without ever merging or blending into one another. On the contrary, their tension seems to make use of the dynamic between impulse and repulsion. Facing each other, embracing one another, freeing oneself from the other: this language of bodies is also the language of dance, which Pina Bausch describes as close to the game of love. To the need to be loved, to the desire to be watched.

To paint the gaze of desire but also the desire of that gaze: it is this mirror-like interplay that the artist stages in her latest works. Through the intensification and the inversion of the motif, conflicting couples face each other, referring us back to our own position as watchers.

“It’s all about the gaze. When you paint, or sing, or write, you’re expressing something to someone, you’re trying to attract someone’s – be it the public’s – attention. There is something that exists in the eye when you desire someone. In a relationship, you exist in mirrors. In the eyes of the other, you see yourself. In this particular show, it has a lot of to do with the eyes of the lover. I need to see myself with their eyes. It’s also the eyes of the viewer. Often imagery about sexuality is pornography. All of which is choreographed or composed or imagined for the viewer. It’s the main reason for its existence. The people who are acting ‘natural’, trying to pretend they’re doing something, are in fact very conscious of being watched, and in this sense, of the mirror. I was very triggered by this idea of an image which has been conceived to be viewed, because a lot of images we create nowadays, are done so by a very instantaneous mirror, with the intention to be seen, for example selfies and social media.”
Claire Tabouret

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Pablo Picasso

Naked Man, Seen from Behind, 1899

Usually, an artist’s “early work” refers to pieces completed at the start of his or her career. In the case of modern master Pablo Picasso, however, the oldest examples of his prolific artistic talent date back much further—beginning, unbelievably, when he was just a child. Picasso was born in 1881 to an artistic set of parents. His father taught him formal drawing techniques from an early age, and by the age of eight he was skilled in oil paint.

‍Over the next few years, Picasso produced academic drawings and paintings that illustrated a rapid improvement, highlighting his advanced understanding of classical art fundamentals, including human anatomy. At just 13 years old, Picasso officially began his career as an artist. During these formative years, he developed a realist style characterised by naturalistic brushwork, a true-to-life colour palette, and everyday subject matter.

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From 1897, however, Picasso’s paintings took on a less lifelike quality. Undoubtedly influenced by Expressionist Edvard Munch and Post-Impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec, these pieces—like Naked Man, Seen from Behind, 1899  —convey Picasso’s growing interest in experimenting with a more freeform, avant-garde style.

“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
Pablo Picasso

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Sunshine Muse: The Art of James Turrell

They say the radiant lighting of the sun-soaked hills of Hollywood is what brought the movie industry in, and has dazzled endless creatives since, making Los Angeles the entertainment capital of the world. The clear sky expressing every angle of the orbiting sun, fluffy clouds, shifting colors, and visible stars, all have a transcendental quality.

We see it in the sunsets and twilights, and on the smiling faces of celebrities, surfers, techies, and all else who thrive in the light. In the 1960s a group of artists were inspired by this light and pioneered the Light and Space Movement, examining light as an artistic medium, as an experience in itself, and as a facilitator of communion with a higher power.

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In the art history timeline, the light and space movement is a classic example of the East Coast West Coast rivalry in America, being seen as a break from the Abstract Expressionism playing out in New York City at the time. In the works of Richard Serra and Robert Morris there is a material purity in sculpture, and in Jackson Pollock a gestural, visceral grasping at existential questions on man’s sense of self. These artists drew from post war America, and war tends to make people ask “why?” about a lot of things, especially reflexively, of one’s own existence. Unlike the poignant drama of this approach, artists on the West Coast flirted with geometric abstraction with an emphasis on “transcendentalist levity” and the boundary-dissolving aspects of light as a medium. There was also an embrace of cutting-edge fabrication methods, due to the new technology that flooded America after years of military innovation for the war. Time went on and protests against the Vietnam War flooded the nation with philosophies of peace, and the motivation to seek it in everyday life. Peace and Love, the hippie movement, and rapid technological innovations paved the way for a new breed of artists in California, that radically changed art exhibition in meaningful ways. These include immersive experiences, emphasis on the personal experience of the viewer, and space age technologies that were becoming available to the public.

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A pioneer of, and arguably the most famous artist of the movement, is James Turrell. Turrell’s ability to “apprehend light”, bend it and shape it, is the main medium of his work. Turrell had a wildly interesting pre-artistic life, where he was raised by Quaker parents including a father who was an aeronautical engineer. A pillar of Quakerism is the belief in “Inner Light”, and this could contextualize his oeuvre’s deep themes of communion with God and desire to “bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit”. Turrell’s famously peaceful presence, is underlined by his choice to be a “conscientious objector” during the Vietnam War. He was a trained pilot by the age of sixteen, and when drafted he ended up flying Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet. It is rumored that this was part of a CIA mission, yet he claims the mission was of strictly humanitarian purposes.

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His self-proclaimed “art habit” developed alongside his studies of perceptual psychology, geology, and astronomy. He was neighbors with Robert Irwin, a fellow artist of the movement, while they both had studios in Venice Beach in the 1970s. They collaborated together in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Technology Program and investigated perceptual phenomena, such as the Ganzfeld effect. At the time Irwin was also using light as a medium, but in an unrestricted way, letting variant light flood empty rooms and determine the artwork experience. Somewhat in opposition, Turrell covered the windows of his studio to only allow prescribed amounts of light from outside to come through the openings and controlling the illumination to create highly specific shapes. This can be seen in his first light projections such as Raethro Pink (Corner Projection), 1968 which appears as a hovering 3D pink triangle, but is actually an optical illusion of projected of light. From these smaller shapes he evolved into immersive rooms, continuing his research on the Ganzfeld effect, defined as “a phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field”. In these works, he created immersive experiences by filling large empty rooms with a unifying color of light and hid all aspects of the light source creating a soothing and disorienting feeling of spaciousness. His 2013 retrospective at the LACMA, debuted Breathing Light, 2013 an immersive pink room that later became the inspiration for Drake’s wildly popular “Hotline Bling” music video. Kayne West has also quoted Turrell as a major inspiration for the immersive color experiences of his Sunday Service performances. Turrell’s lifelong project, The Roden Crater, is also the set of Kanye’s 2019 IMAX film “Jesus is King”. Prior to making the film, Kayne reportedly donated $10 million towards the project. This demonstrates the contemporaneity of his work, and the unending inspiration he has provided to many multidisciplinary creatives.

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Turrell’s Skyspaces are less known in the mainstream but are equally iconic to art aficionados. The Skyspaces are works that are enclosed spaces open to the sky through an aperture in the roof. The enclosed spaces normally have a perimeter of benches where viewers can sit and watch the sky change. The roof creates a frame for the ever-changing sky, giving it the experience of viewing a canvas stretched across the ceiling. These works have been described as a “celestial viewing room designed to create the rather magical illusion that the sky is within reach”. The concept of bringing the sky within reach has been with Turrell all along, and will outlive him in his monumental project, the Roden Crater. In the year 2020, Turrell has been working on the crater for around 40 years and it is about 1/3 of the way complete. Timely, he is expected to open the highly secretive project to a small group of viewers this May, for the price of $6,500 in efforts to raise money for its completion. What is the Roden Crater? The Roden Crater is a skyspace in its highest form. In 1979 Turrell acquired a small, extinct volcano located in Arizona. Since then he has spent decades shifting tons of dirt, building tunnels, and creating apertures in efforts to transform the crater into a naked-eye observatory for experiencing celestial phenomena. This project truly speaks to compilation of all his interests and is a monument to his greatest desire, to “bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.” Without the use of high-tech telescopes, to see celestial phenomena with the naked eye could be nothing short of a transcendental experience.

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The British Artist Cecily Brown is in a League of Her Own

On 17th of September the prestigious Blenheim Art Foundation is opening a solo exhibition dedicated to the British artist Cecily Brown. The show runs through January 3rd, 2021 and features entirely new works from Brown created in reaction to the landscape at Blenheim Palace, as well as its history and art collection. The stately home has seen infusions of contemporary art before, through solo shows of artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Jenny Holzer and Yves Klein among others.

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It has been a meteoric rise for Cecily Brown, whose large scale canvases have been steadily popular since the 1990s. After graduating from Slade Fine Art School in London she relocated to New York City where she now lives and works. She felt stifled by the presence of her contemporary British artists and thought the welcoming New York scene when SoHo still buzzed with galleries was a better fit for her. She was the first show at Jeffrey Deitch’s Deitch Projects in 1995 before getting swept up by Gagosian and later landing at Paula Cooper. In May 2020, Gagosian sold her work Figures in a Landscape I, 2001 from its online viewing room for $5.5 million. Which still trails behind her auction record, Suddenly last Summer, 1999, that sold for $6.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2018. She is also represented in institutions such as Tate, London and MoMA, New York. Two particularly oversized works made for The Metropolitan Opera in New York earned prime spots in the theater for the 2018 season.

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“There was never a point when she wasn’t a giant star” -Sam Orlofsky, Director at Gagosian

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Brown was born in London to a novelist and an art critic resulting in a British cum bohemian upbringing. Her father, David Sylvester, whom she believed to be an acquaintance of her mother before learning their true relation in her twenties, introduced her to Francis Bacon. Her early exposure to Bacon’s work is a clear reference. She has no problem with constant lines being drawn from her work to that of the past claiming “the desire to be new is just as bad as the desire to be fashionable.”

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At first glance Cecily Brown’s paintings seem chaotic but she is quick to clarify that her process is much more meticulous than it lets on. Known for her vast array of art historical references, Brown’s paintings might seem familiar. The dense and layered pieces have bits of important Western artists such as Joan Mitchell and compositions echoing Pablo Picasso and Théodore Géricault. Aware of her painterly touch, she said to Apollo Magazine:

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“I think they’re (the YBA’s) the children of Gilbert and George and Bacon in a way that I feel I am as well. I’ve just got a bit more Turner thrown in.” –Cecily Brown

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Most renowned is her combination of abstraction and figuration. Much of her early work centered on the female body which is nothing new to Western art but, in opposition to her predecessors, many of whom were male, Brown’s desire is to represent the female gaze. While her representation can be overtly sexual it is clearly missing the violence seen in the work of Willhem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, artists her work is often compared to. She will begin numerous canvases at once and take years to finish them. Processes by which fresh eyes and countless layers shape the piece. This creates a storied final production with a fleshy physicality to it. However, definitive style does not negate an ever evolving body of work. In more recent years she has begun to turn to the natural world, animals and landscape, as other subjects of her work. Alongside her paintings she also creates smaller monotype prints on paper.

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The canvases make the viewer recall some of their most beloved art within the comfort of the painting medium but get put into her unique language just enough to make them feel innovative. “The whole figurative abstract thing is about not wanting to name something, not pin it down. I’ve never wanted to let go of the figure, but it keeps wanting to disappear. It’s always a fight to hold on.” Brown said. She has struck the right chord between absent and accessible, familiar and modern. Her success shows that art historical favourites such as Abstract Expressionism appeal, but benefit from a contemporary, female subversion.

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In line with her previous work, the illustrious past of Blenheim Palace gave Brown plenty of opportunity to tie it into the exhibition. In The Blenheim Art Foundation’s release they stated she was able to “visually reference masterpieces by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Anthony Van Dyck on view at the Palace, as well as family heraldry, armorial banners and the martial scenes of the Blenheim Tapestries that line the State Rooms.” Even with rich art historical references, it’s a thoroughly modern affair with one of the preeminent female artists of the 21st century.

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Repainting History: Flora Yukhnovich, Anna Weyant, Kylie Manning

Artists have always looked to their predecessors for inspiration — Cecily Brown looked to Pollock, Pollock to Picasso, Picasso to Velázquez, Velázquez to Rubens. Whether adopting the techniques of an older period of painting or directly calling back to the compositions of another artist, the history of art continues to be the most bountiful resource for artists creating new works today. Notably, the techniques and compositions of Old Masters has been a particular focus of many emerging female painters — an intriguing dialogue that calls into question many of the stylistic and subject choices that the (mostly male) painters of the 18th and 19th centuries chose. In particular, there are three female painters, who’s nods to the Old Masters are particularly interesting. 

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British painter, Flora Yukhnovich, adopts the language of the the Rococo, reimagining the dynamism of works from 18th century artists such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. She translates the language of the Rococo through an intriguing filter of contemporary cultural references such as film, food and consumerism, bringing classically inspired painterly traditions into a more consciously feminine and contemporary realm. Featuring wisps of millennial pinks and purples, her mark making ranges from delicate flourishes to dramatic and gestural brushstrokes, heightening the rhythmic sensuality that plays throughout her ambitious compositions.

18th Century painter, Jean-Honoré Fragonard is one of her key points of inspiration, as evidenced in her painting Butter Wouldn’t Melt (2020). Yukhnovich transforms the luscious garden scenes of Fragonard, popularized by famous works such as The Swing (1767), into her own scenes of transcience and movement. While Fragonard would focus in on one or two key subjects, bathing them in sunlight to direct the eye of the viewer, Yukhnovich instead blurs her bodies into mountains of flesh, layers of overlapping arms and legs, as if a reflection of the overindulgence of contemporary society and our more open attitudes towards sex. Most notably, Yukhnovich, through her process of deconstructing and transforming classical painterly traditions, creates bodies of flesh that are not clearly gendered, removing the objectification and sexualization of female subjects often seen in 18th century painting.

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The paintings of American artist, Anna Weyant, are at once delightful and yet strangely grotesque due to the artist’s emphasis on voluptuous bodies and distorted facial expressions. Her paintings — mostly portraits of women and still life scenes — conjure figures and objects reminiscent of ourselves and our lives but with an uncanny quality. Drawing upon centuries of Western painting, Weyant references an eclectic range of art historical influences — her painterly style is a modern twist on the Baroque tradition, following Dutch masters like Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Judith Leyster.

In her painting Chest (2020), Weyant remodifies the iconic subject of Venus’, and her pose in Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485). Utilizing her characteristic sepia-toned palette, Weyant washes out Botticelli’s glowing golden skin tones in favour of curious, unsettling shades of black and brown. She chooses to zoom in on just the chest of her subject, moving away from Botticelli’s grand, full body portrayal. The directness of Weyant’s composition calls into question not only Botticelli’s original depiction Venus, but also attitudes surrounding nudity and the female body in the 21st century. 

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Paintings by American artist, Kylie Manning, are rooted in the wild, sweeping landscapes of her childhood, which was split between Alaska and Mexico. The works are large-scale – a riot of colour, energy, and diaphanous figures. Manning employs a technique used by Old Master painters, including Johannes Vermeer, in which countless layers of oils are applied to the canvas’s surface in order to absorb and refract light. As with many of her contemporaries, Manning’s style balances between the lines of abstraction and figuration, using delicate washes of colour, precise lines, and heavy impasto in order to bring her figures into being.

The tangled bodies in Manning’s paintings move through dreamlike space in quasi-theatrical compositions that recall the grand history paintings of nineteenth century artists such as Théodore Géricault, Winslow Homer, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. As seen in her painting, Now and Then (2022), the mounds of human bodies and their dramatic movements are reminiscent of Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa (1819) – perhaps even a nod to Manning’s time spent at sea, working on commercial fishing boats. She merges the extravangence of history paintings with a sense of fluidity and rawness that is distinctly contemporary, an effect achieved through washes of pastel-toned colors together that bleed into one another.

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Rise of a New Generation of Chinese Female Artists Redefining Abstraction

Will China become the international center for contemporary art? Young female Chinese artists that are redefining the notions that prompted artistic movements such as Abstraction certainly make a case for it. With a distinctive creative style that is emblematic of a young, curious, technologically savvy generation, they are gaining recognition both at home and abroad. Unlike their predecessors, who took an interest in societal problems and politics, these contemporary artists are living in the moment and expressing their own emotions. As lifestyles around the world change, their aesthetics are also widely embraced. Here are some of our favorite Chinese female abstract artists that are setting the tone for the future of the movement.

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Xiyao Wang

 Born 1992 in Chongqing, China. Lives and works in Berlin.

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Xiyao Wang is one of the most prominent young voices in abstract painting. Celebrated for her immersive and commanding paintings. Wang’s unique creative vocabulary is apparent in her distinctive use of colour, volume and texture. Her body of work draws her personal awareness and sensitivity, as she utilizes it to transfer experiences and feelings to the external world. With a combination of various techniques such as acrylic, oil, chalk, oil sticks, graphite, she seeks to create an equilibrium between the body and the canvas in a physical displacement. Her work includes multicolored and expressive lines that provoke the vastness of landscapes, movements and thoughts composing emotional, arrangements that grace the canvas in harmonious, dynamic movements, layered onto compact pastel-colored backgrounds. With a profound knowledge of both Asian and Western traditions, which she masterfully incorporates into her work results in large-scale works that are filled with energy, and movement.

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Kristy M Chan

Born 1997 in Hong Kong China. Lives and works in London.

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Kristy M Chan’s creative process closely observes how social and natural environments shape one’s perception and identity. She explores the feelings of disorientation whilst existing between Eastern and Western cultures through kaleidoscopic colorfields and indistinct figures. Although her earlier works were semi-figurative, Chan’s recent pieces have shown a shift towards complete abstraction. She masterfully critiques the culture of excess that defines contemporary urban life and behavior with assertive and dynamic pieces. With her artistic practice that combines narratives of migration and displacement, her multilayered works often depart from her experience navigating her inquires of what means home. Her body of work has a distinctively kaleidoscopic and vibrant palette of jeweled tones that synthesizes together accidental and sometimes surreal junctures, while simultaneously conjuring the dizzying cadence of contemporary life.

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Han Bing

Born 1986 in China. Lives and works in Paris.

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Recognized for her disruptive yet sensual visual language in paintings that break down the barriers of illustrated reality and open up new dimensions. Han Bing’s practice draws on urban elements, including street scenes and architectural facades. Drawing inspiration from the patterns and textures that are displayed in cities, especially the mistakes and glitches, for the artist ‘painting is a way to resist all the information that is being forced on us’, and her observations of city life serve as a starting point for the processing of emotional impressions. Influences from theatre, science and literature are apparent in her body work, as Han allows the dynamics of the works to lead their compositions. Her works gradually move towards abstraction as figurative elements are filtered and deconstructed into fragments.

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Zhang Zipiao

Born 1993 in Beijing, China. Lives and works in Shanghai.

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Through subtle and loaded abstractions that echo social media culture as well as personal experience, emerging contemporary artist Zhang Zipiao’s work explores shifting modern social standards and the politics of representation. Zhang’s inspiration comes from online channels such as YouTube and Instagram. She questions and reflects on how social media has influenced the perception of beauty, as well as how it led users to create online personas that mask their true selves. With nuanced erotic scenes and subject juxtapositions, Zhang explores these themes in an unconventional and playful way. Zhang Zipiao’s paintings are made with bold sweeping, gestural brushstrokes, accompanied by graphic line work and sharp contrasting colours. Filled with irreverent visuals and metaphors, the large-scale artworks have references to Internet culture, objects from daily life, and meditations. The young artist has held three solo exhibitions around Beijing, in the Ying Space Gallery, Star Gallery and White Space Gallery.

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Women Artists And Minimalism

Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic. A wave of new influences and rediscovered styles led younger artists to question conventional boundaries between various media.

The new art favoured the cool over the “dramatic”: their sculptures were frequently fabricated from industrial materials and emphasised anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract Expressionism. Painters and sculptors began to avoid overt symbolism and emotional content, instead calling attention to the materiality of the works.

Minimalists created works that resembled factory-built commodities and upended traditional definitions of art whose meaning was tied to a narrative or to the artist. They called for simple, three-dimensional, geometric forms that were stripped of any illusionism, iconography, or personal expression and made using industrial processes and materials like plywood, aluminum, and plastic. The use of prefabricated industrial materials and simple, often repeated geometric forms together with the emphasis placed on the physical space occupied by the artwork led to some works that forced the viewer to confront the arrangement and scale of the forms. Viewers also were led to experience qualities of weight, height, gravity, agility or even the appearance of light as a material presence. They were often faced with artworks that demanded a physical as well as a visual response.

Despite the movement being largely male dominated -with Sol Lewitt, Frank Stella or Robert Morris at the forefront of its ethos and practice- a significant number of female artists pioneered its development and made grand contributions to the genre. Often overlooked, in the list below we shine a light on these women whose minimalist, or post-minimalist, approach to art making made, or is making, a revolutionary impact in the history of art, from the 1960’s to the present:

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Mary Corse
b. 1945 in California
Mary Corse investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her fifty-year career. Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. Corse’s art emphasises the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

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Agnes Martin
b. 1912 in Canada, d. 2004 in New Mexico
Agnes Martin was one of the most influential painters of her generation and left an enduring mark on the history of modern and contemporary art. Interested in the transcendent potential of painting, Martin was a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, and identified her work with the movement. Nonetheless, her oeuvre played a critical role in heralding the advent of Minimalism. Characterised by austere lines and grids superimposed upon grounds of muted colour, Martin’s paintings elegantly negotiate the confines of structure, space, draftsmanship, and the metaphysical.

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Carmen Herrera
b. 1915 in Cuba
Carmen Herrera is an American-Cuban Minimalist artist working in both sculpture and painting. Having achieved success late in life—she sold her first piece at the age of 89—she is today considered a major figure in geometric abstraction. “My quest is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions,” she has declared, and her work is characterised by its radically reductive use of forms, reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly or Josef Albers. Among her most iconic series are the Blanco y Verde (1959–1971) paintings, striking white-and-green compositions that confront both the physicality of painting and its relationship to its surroundings. A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint.

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Roni Horn
b. 1955 in New York
Since the late 1970s, Roni Horn has produced drawings, photography, sculpture and installations, as well as works involving words and writing. Horn’s work, which has an emotional and psychological dimension, can be seen an engagement with post-Minimalist forms as containers for affective perception. She talks about her work being ‘moody’ and ‘site-dependent’. Her attention to the specific qualities of certain materials spans all mediums, from the textured pigment drawings, to the use of solid gold or cast glass, and rubber. Nature and humankind, the weather, literature and poetry are central to her art.

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Ann Veronica Janssens
b. 1956 in the UK
Adopting the visual languages of science and Minimalism, Ann Veronica Janssens’s work suggests that all perception is fragile at best. Creating installations, projections, immersive environments, urban interventions, and sculptures, Janssens explores the sensory experience of reality. Space, distribution of light, radiant colour, and translucent or reflective surfaces all serve to reveal the instability of our perception of time and space. She explores properties of matter: gloss, lightness, transparency, fluidity) and physical phenomena: reflection, refraction, perspective, balance, waves in order to destabilise ideas about materiality.

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SPEAKING THE MIND, PORTRAYING THE BODY

In rhythm with the theme of this year’s Biennale, our exhibition Corpo e Mente is a contemporary representation of the human form, exploring the different ways in which artists today depict ideas of identity. At Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, the exhibition brings together an array of critically acclaimed artists whose work delves deep into the human psyche to convey notions of gender, race and sexuality.

Using the body as a means to express their minds and sentiments, the artists in this exhibition approach the portrayal of the human body in a raw and audacious way; where soul and anatomy fuse together to configure a plethora of personalities. Flirting between abstraction and figurations, these characters are often too allegorical, often too explicit; but all powerfully relatable. Challenging the ways in which the human form has traditionally been depicted in art history, each of the artists exhibited presents through their work an alternative way to see oneself in relationship to the world around us, allowing the viewer to reflect on notions of both individual and collective consciousness.

‍On the occasion of the exhibition opening, we speak to the artists Ellie Pratt, Jenny Morgan, Andrew Pierre Hart and Alex Foxton about how they approach the depiction of the human figure how does it relate to their own persona.

‍Ellie Pratt

Born 1991 in London. Lives and works in London.

Ellie Pratt’s works draw upon the psychological tension of women fulfilling a directed role in fashion photography. In Pratt’s work the objectification of women is heightened by exposing the dynamics of the male gaze as perpetuated through the published image.

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“Painting is naturally a reflection of the self and the image of the female figure holds so many historical and cultural complexities but what is most important to me is the lightness and immediacy within the act of painting. To be able to leave behind the weight of context and enable the painting to hold a moment is such an empowering gesture. Perhaps what I’m seeking from depicting the female form in this way is an intimate space to unconsciously gather, harness and abandon an emotive energy within myself.”
Ellie Pratt

‍Jenny Morgan

Born 1982 in Utah. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Technically intricate with a haunting quality, Morgan’s paintings experiment with psychological visual realism, obscuring the physical to expose the spiritual. She obfuscates the portraits’ meticulous details by annihilating their likeness, stripping away layers like physical and spiritual wounds, while retaining a striking intimacy. Like an archeologist, she digs to discover the subject’s identity. Her corporeal but also ethereal portraits become almost supernatural portrayals, hovering between the spheres of the known and the unknown. Her intensely personal work examines the complexity of human relationships and the multiplicities of self-awareness. Her subjects sometimes hold objects as metaphors for their personalities.

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“My approach to depicting the human body is grounded in presence and realism. I have a deep curiosity for the psychological nature of my subjects, and place great importance on a portrait’s ability to possess a human spirit or a sense of aliveness. I view the concept of persona as a tool—the persona, or mask, can disguise identity, especially as it relates to the self. I often work with a subject who I consider to be my doppelgänger: she is her own being, but also acts as a malleable mirror. Working with the body is often a heavy, self-reflective journey filled with light and dark material, both of which require emotional processing—the persona offers a mask of protection, which then creates space for deeper exploration into both ends of the optic spectrum.”
Jenny Morgan

‍Andrew Pierre Hart

Born in London. Lives and works in London.

Andrew Pierre Hart explores the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting through ongoing rhythmic research and play between improvised and spontaneous generative processes. The artist’s practice questions the many formalities and dialogues around painting. His works explore somatic responses to ideas relating to sound including acoustic levitation, spatialisation, the human as a vessel of sound and the creation of physical and theoretical space. Deeply influenced by music, Hart’s work is a renegotiation of the visual language and legacies of Western abstraction, probing connections between the phenomena, language and representation of sound in painting. He holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2019) and BA inFine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (2017) and he was includedin the show Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Southbank Centre, Lon-don (2021).

“The first thing you will usually notice with the male figures in my work is the signifying form for the black figure being the hair; it really indicates my interest in the idea of a black aesthetics or stylisation, celebrating difference and what it can bring to the dialogue of contemporary art and widening conversations. The female figures are often protagonists and leaders of the sound experiments enacted in the paintings, however, they are placed at junctures, where the position doesn’t always seem to be dominant, which puts into question how we think of positionally, theoretically as well as physically. This all ties back to my understanding of composition and reading painting but also questions what we instantly read or understand when faced with an artwork; a kind of debunking of ideas of what we think we see. In the work, there are three male figures and free female figures, this balance or pairing, is a way of thinking about listening, hearing and reciprocation… I feel we are at a listening phase in life, sometimes it feels like a stage, an opera, a movie or the grand story we call life…”
Andrew Pierre Hart

Alex Foxton

Born in 1980 in England. Lives and works in Paris.

Alex Foxton’s painting takes traditional images of masculinity, deconstructs their archetypes and reveals their complexity and ambiguity. He explores the personal history of the heroes or mythical figures that inhabit our western culture, painting a new narrative. The figures depicted are stretched, torn be-tween a calm face and an expressive body, tortuous or ecstatic, underlining the tension of each character. Alex tries to get rid of the objective and dominant gaze that shapes these virile male figures to reveal an embodied vision and to let a desire for these bodies come to life. Foxton broadens hips and shoulders and minimises waists and jawlines to create androgynous male figures and sensual portraits that recall Modern masters Picasso and Matisse in their acrobatic forms and flat colours.

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“In my work the body is the arena where ideas and impulses play out. The figure is a stand in for the viewer, for myself, or for painting itself. This is why my figures are usually an amalgam of found images, observation and pure imagination. I’m hoping that the viewer connects as fully as possible with the image and the physical presence of the painting. The diptych in the show is an attempt to present two different sensibilities at once – one that is symbolic, dreamy and light; the other representative, graphic and bold. I hope the effect is of a contradiction that is never fully resolved, but is somehow peaceful, the way we live with the two sides of ourselves, the inner self and the outside presentation.”
Jenny Morgan

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Spilling Over: Painting Colour in the 60s and 70s

In 2019, the Whitney Museum of American Art organised a major exhibition gathering the works of artists active during the 1960s and early 1970s, to show how their urge to create something new gave birth to bold and colourful works. The show featured artists like Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Carmen Herrera, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Miriam Schapiro and Frank Stella among others; all artists that used saturated, hallucinatory acrylic colours to activate the viewer’s perception.

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The revolution of social norms about clothing, sex, gender and other formalities that occurred at the time,  had an undeniable impact on the Art World. Artists started pulling away from what they knew and approached new painting techniques and subject matters. Colour became an element that could carry a formal problem as well as a political statement.

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This interest in colour and perception translated into different artistic languages; Colour Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvases to dramatise the materiality of painting and its visual force. Op artists developed patterns, geometric abstractions and intense colour combinations to highlight that vision is commonly of physical response and unconscious association. While, an emerging generation of artists of colour and women explored colour’s capacity to articulate questions about perception of race and gender.

 

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland was an American painter better known for his association to Colour Field painting, an artistic style that developed in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, when young artists started breaking from Abstract Expressionism. Colour Field painting tried to eliminate the artist’s gesture and angst, typical of the past, in favour of the production of large fields of flat and solid colour picture planes.

 

The movement is mostly associated to Clement Greenberg, who referred to it as Post-Painterly Abstraction. In 1964, he curated a namesake group show – that included Noland’s work – which helped to establish Colour Field as the new main contemporary art movement.

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Noland began experimenting with this new technique in the early 1950s, when in Washington D.C., together with Morris Louis, he met Helen Frankenthaler and learnt her ‘soak-in’ technique, which allowed thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases. With the aim of moving the attention from the artist to the piece, Noland painted with rollers and sponges alongside with traditional brushes.

 

Noland employed simplified abstractions so not to detract from the main subject: colour. His preoccupation with the relationship between image and the containing edge led him to always produce his works in series, creating regular schematic compositions with different combinations of colours; starting with circles, moving to chevrons and diamonds.

 

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In 1966, he composed a series of horizontal stripes of pure colour. This series represents a perfect example of Noland’s mantra of using simple patterns to drive the spectator’s attention towards the effect of colour.

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Throughout his career, Noland remained one of the main representatives of Colour Field painting; even between the 1970s and 1980s, when he became a pioneer of shaped canvases, creating asymmetrical diamonds and chevrons, his concern remained to produce sophisticated and controlled color and surface integrity.

 

Miriam Schapiro

While Colour Field painters employed simple abstractions and colour to explore formal concerns, other artists employed these to reference socio-political issues. Miriam Schapiro explored how geometric abstraction could serve also feminist concerns. Over her career, she experimented with a variety of mediums like paintings, drawing, textiles and sculptures. She is known for founding the Pattern and Decoration Movement (1975– 1985) and co-founding the Feminist Art Program with Judy Chicago.

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As Noland, Schapiro started her career by creating paintings that drew from the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, producing works that were hypnotic, mystical and revealed her mastery of colour and technique. However, at the beginning of the 1960s, she began to eliminate the brushwork and introduce a variety of geometric forms. Between 1961 and 1963, she created a body of work called the Shrines, a quasi-Surrealist, geometric compositions which contained figurative references to femininity and art history. Although being quite innovative and gravitating towards the new trends, these works did not fit in any of the movements that were going on at the time.

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The turning point for Schapiro was when in 1967, she moved to California. There, with the help of her close friend David Nalibof, a physician at the University of California, Schapiro discovered the potential that computers had in assisting artists with preliminary sketches. Being already interested in hard-edged, abstract and minimal imagery Schapiro realised that she could employ this technology to adjust her sketches until the perfect image emerged.

 

Although at the time Schapiro was not yet directly linked to Feminist art, she employed the computer to create geometries that resembled apertures and passage ways that evoked the female body. Her first computer-aided body of work, Big Ox #1 (1968) depicts an ‘O’ at its centre, evocative of the female womb.

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Between 1967 and 1971, Schapiro was considered as the pioneer of the then rising field of computer-aided art, showing that her art did not only lean onto feminist issues but also contained formal concerns.

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