Women-in-Art Exhibitions to visit in Spring 2023
For a long time, female artists stayed in the shadow of men on the artistic scene. Just after the Royal Academy closed the exhibition Making Modernism, where the audience had an opportunity to discover the trailblazing women hidden from the history of 20th-century Modernism (with Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin featuring in it), new exhibitions dedicated to the power and talent of women in art pop out here and there around the world.
It is little wonder nowadays the modern world is trying to chase, find and celebrate talented women in art. Underestimated back then, the virtue of women deserves to attract attention nowadays.
Magdalena Abakanowicz "Every Tangle of Thread and Rope": until 21 May 2023This exhibition presents a rare opportunity to explore this extraordinary body of work. Many of the most significant Abakans, or radical sculptures created by the artist from woven fibre, will be brought together in a forest-like display in the 64-metre long gallery space of the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern.
The exhibition explores this transformative period of Abakanowicz’s practice when her woven forms came off the wall and into three-dimensional space. With these works she brought soft, fibrous forms into a new relationship with sculpture. A selection of early textile pieces and her little-known drawings are also on show.
Maria Bartuszová: until 25 June 2023
Prague-born Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová worked over three decades in Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia. She created around 500 sculptures, from small organic forms to commissions for public spaces as well as works in the landscape, despite restrictions on her artistic life during this period. This survey exhibition in Tate Modern highlights the abstract sculptures of the artist.
In the 1960s Bartuszová experimented using her own distinctive method of casting plaster by hand. Inspired by playing with her young daughter, she created abstract shapes by pouring plaster into rubber balloons – her signature material was white plaster, giving the sculptures a fragile quality.
Some suggest raindrops, seeds or eggs, others the human body. Later, she allowed the balloons to burst, creating delicate works similar to cocoons or nests.
"Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle": until 21 May 2023 at the Barbican
The Barbican hosts the largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel. The exhibition showcases her vibrant, expressionistic portraits created across her 60-year career.
Neel painted figuratively during a period in which it was deeply unfashionable to do so. She persisted with her distinctive, expressionistic style, even though it meant that for most of her life she lacked material comfort, let alone critical recognition.
Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground,' Neel chose to portray individuals who were not typically the subjects of painting – pregnant women, labour leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists, queer performers – retaliating against exclusionary histories. Each of her paintings radiates with her sense of the humanity and dignity of each subject.
"Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists And Global Abstraction 1940-70": until 7 May 2023 at Whitechapel GalleryIt is believed that the Abstract Expressionist movement began in the USA, but this exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing gestural abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts – from the rise of fascism in parts of South America and East Asia to the influence of Communism in Eastern Europe and China.
Reaching beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionist movement, this exhibition celebrates the practices of the numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Whitechapel Gallery presents an exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists, with American artists Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi among them.