WOMEN ARTISTS TO WATCH IN 2025
Nancy Genn
Claire Blitz
Sonia Gechtoff
Dee Shapiro
Martha Szabo
Beate Wheeler
WOMEN ARTISTS TO WATCH IN 2025
December 16, 2024 - January 31, 2025
Curated and Artist Biographies Written by: David Eichholtz
December 2024, New York
The exhibition, “Women Artists to Watch in 2025”, continues a current look in the art world at established women artists who have not yet received the critical recognition that is due them. The artists, Claire Blitz, Sonia Gechtoff, Nancy Genn, Dee Shapiro, Martha Szabo, and Beate Wheeler all studied and worked hard in their respective aesthetic fields to master and hone their craft, create their unique visual language, and pursue their artistic endeavors despite not having gallery representation during much of their career, museum exhibitions, nor critical press coverage. Yet, they stood tall and continued to create their artworks, resolve their own aesthetic questions, and support themselves through their devotion and passion to their art.
Martha Szabo
Cityscape, Blue Sky Pink Sunset , 1975 ca
Oil on canvas
9 x 12”
Martha Szabo
Cityscape, Night Lights, Balcony Rail, Orb Reflected , 1975 ca
Oil on canvas
8 x 10”
Martha Szabo
Cityscape, Sunset, Orange,Yellow Rings , 1976
Oil on canvas
8 x 10”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Martha Szabo
Crescent Moon over Manhattan (MS 39) , 1988
Oil on canvas
16 x 12”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
About Martha Szabo (1928, Debrecen, Hungary – 2023, New York):
Szabo’s deeply personal paintings—informed by Cubism, Constructivism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and Surrealism—invite comparisons with Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Dali. Admirably productive during her extraordinary five-decade career, working with almost tireless initiative despite lack of consistent gallery representation or exhibition deadlines, Martha Szabo painted ode after profound ode to the metropolis, New York City, that she adored, her sanctuary city, her final home after years of hardship in Eastern Europe before and during World War II.
From her Point of View atop a mid-century apartment building, Szabo recorded the architectural drama unfolding as the NYC of John V. Lindsay embarked on its golden era of energetic planning, master building, and construction. Szabo’s vantage point on tall, and ever taller, modern structures, juxtaposed with the expressive rooftops of stalwart, older walk-up buildings that withstood the built environment’s sixties-seventies seismic shift. It was balm for the artist’s spirit to observe and chronicle how natural phenomena burnished the inspiring architectural energy of her adopted imperial city with spectacular cloud formations, sunrises, sunsets, and even rainbows.
Beate Wheeler
Untitled (BW-5169) , 1971
Oil on canvas
28 x 28”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Below: Detail
Beate Wheeler
Untitled (BW-5213) , 1971
Oil on canvas
20 x 26” Framed size 20.5” x 26.5”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Beate Wheeler
Untitled (BW-5350) , 1971
Oil on canvas
26.75 x 24.75”
Right: Full Image
Beate Wheeler
Untitled (BW-5291), 1983
Oil on canvas
34 x 24 inches
About Beate Wheeler (1932 – 2017):
Beate Wheeler, born in Germany in 1932, fled with her family in 1938 and arrived at Ellis Island in New York. She studied at Manumit in Pawling, New York until 1945, an experimental Christian socialist boarding school for refugee children. After receiving her BFA degree at Syracuse in 1954, Wheeler earned her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley under Abstract Expressionist painter, Milton Resnick. While in the Bay area, she met Mark di Suvero and the two moved to the East Village in New York. Together with Robert Beauchamp, Elaine de Kooning and Patricia Passlof, they formed the March Gallery, one of the eight galleries and artist cooperatives that were known as the 10th Street Galleries.
Wheeler married the writer and artist Spencer Holst. Early residents at the Westbeth Artists Housing in New York’s West Village, Wheeler lived and worked there the rest of her life. She painted regularly and produced drawings and artworks for Spencer’s publications. She exhibited primarily at the Wesbeth galleries and had many dedicated private collectors, including Nelson A. Rockefeller. Following a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, she passed away May 14, 2017.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled , 2004
Acrylic and graphite on canvas board
18 x 14” Framed Dimensions: 20.5 x 16.5
Untitled , 1985
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Sonia Gechtoff
Acrylic and graphite on paper
10 x 10”
Untitled, 1992
Acrylic and gouache on paper
10.25 x 7”
Paper size 16” x 13”- Framed: 17 3/4 x 14 in (45.1 x 35.6 cm)
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Wild Wave II , 1984
Below: Detail
Sonia Gechtoff
Acrylic and graphite on paper
14 x 13.25”
Right: Full Image
About Sonia Gechtoff (1926 – 2018):
After graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1950, Gechtoff moved to San Francisco in 1951, immersing herself in the Beat Generation. Inspired by the works of Clyfford Still, she changed her approach to painting and became friends with Bay Area artists such as Hassel Smith, Madeline Dimond, Ernest Briggs, Elmer Bischoff, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, and Deborah Remington. She studied and taught briefly at what is now called the San Francisco Art Institute.
Gechtoff gained national recognition in 1954 when her work was presented in the Guggenheim Museum’s, Younger American Painters, exhibition alongside Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. Her mastery of the palette knife generating forceful, impasto strokes of color garnered Gechtoff a solo exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 1957, the first Abstract Expressionist female artist to have a solo museum show on the East or West coast of the US. That same year she was included in the Ferus Gallery inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles alongside Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jay DeFeo, among others, and later that year had the first solo artist exhibition at Ferus followed by her second solo in 1959.
In 1958, Gechtoff moved to New York and continued to experiment with her work throughout her seven-decade career. In the early 1960s she started incorporating graphite drawings on her brushed acrylic surfaces after moving from impasto oil paint. Represented by major New York galleries, including Poindexter and Gruenebaum, Gechtoff received excellent reviews from Dore Ashton and Hilton Kramer. She taught at New York University, Adelphi University, Art Institute of Chicago and the National Academy Museum and School, among others. Gechtoff was the recipient of the 2013 Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award, and her works are a part of major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
Gechtoff was one of only 12 women painters included in the important 2016 exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, organized by the Denver Art Museum. It put a spotlight on women painters, some well-known and others less so, and initiated an examination of their involvement and contributions to a pivotal art historical movement. Gechtoff was also included in the major exhibition in 2023 at Whitechapel Gallery, Action, Gesture Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70, that examined 150 artworks by 81 women artists and took a broader and international view of the gesture and abstraction by women, many who had been overlooked during that period.
Opus 36 (pink) , 2020
Mixed media (casein and graphite) painting on paper
30 x 22.5”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Nancy Genn
Below: Detail
Nancy Genn
Rainbars 17 Midnight , 2019
Casein on paper
37 x 30”
Right: Full Image
Nancy Genn
Rainbars 32 , 2022
Casein painting on kozo mitsumata paper
41.75 x 28 inches
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
About Nancy Genn (B 1929):
Genn, a California artist whose artworks have been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally, lives and works in Berkeley. She studied at the California School of Fine Arts and University of California, Berkeley between 1947 and 1949. Her early Abstract Expressionist paintings were very much influenced by Michel Tapié, a critic, theorist, and painter known for his influences on Tachisme, an approach to expressionistic painting in France in the 1950s and 60s. Along with Dubuffet and Breton, Tapié founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut. Tapié is also credited with L’art Informel by way of his book, “Art of Another Kind”, published in 1952 describing a style of art making in Europe, and more specifically “action paining” and “lyrical abstraction”, in response to American Abstract Expressionism. In Michel Tapié’s seminal publication, Morphologie Autre, 1960, he located Nancy Genn’s artworks alongside those of Carla Accardi, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Emilio Vedova.
In 1978 Genn was awarded the prestigious United States/Japan Creative Arts Fellowship that allowed her to travel and lecture about her pioneering techniques in Japan. In the 1980s she received wide recognition for her experiments with paper, exhibiting with Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis in the US and in Asia (New American Paperworks, 1982-83). She was invited several times as visiting artist to Rome by the American Academy, also Turin by ICAR (International Center of Aesthetic Research), Venice by the Cini Foundation (2019) for an exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro and recently to Todi (2020), to participate in the first Festival of Arts as a tribute to Beverly Pepper. Significant retrospectives of her artworks include Planes of Light (2003) at the Fresno Art Museum, CA, and Architecture from Within (2018) at Palazzo Ferro Fini, Venice. Her artworks are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Los Angeles County Museum, CA, San Francisco Museum of Art, CA, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N, and National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.
My Standing Nude , 2022
Mixed media on paper
26 x 16”
Framed size - 32.5 x 19”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Dee Shapiro
My Danea , 2021
Mixed media on paper
32 x 34”
Framed size - 36.5 x 37.75”
Right: Full Image
Below: Detail
Dee Shapiro
Dee Shapiro Modesty , 2023
Mixed Media on Paper
16 x 10”
media on paper
Dee Shapiro
Modesty 2 , 2023
Mixed
9 x 13”
About Dee Shapiro (b. 1936):
In the beginning, the early 1970s, Shapiro explored pattern. First, the Fibonacci progression color coded on graph paper, a piece which landed in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. Next, inclusion in the Pattern and Decoration (P & D) exhibition at PS1, followed by a series of work that included architectural elements “off the grid”. With all the work, always color and a nod to the Albers’ studies. A redirection to small horizontal paintings of the geometry in cities and landscapes ensued for several years.
Missing the early fascination and engagement with pattern led to more recent work exploring evocative biological and organic forms, the evolution of which is the more recent work as well as borrowing from sources that include other artist’s work in a collaborative effort. In this new body of work, Shapiro is unflinchingly forging ahead to newly terrain including the female body and classical nudes throughout art history.
Shapiro’s artworks were included in the recent exhibition, With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (October 27, 2019 through May 3, 2020) and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (June 26 – November 28, 2021). Her artworks are included in the permanent collections of many museums, foundations and private collections, including the following: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, and the William Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, Mount Kisco, NY, among numerous others.
Claire Blitz
Burgundy, 1975 ca
Acrylic on canvas
40 x 30”
Claire Blitz
Semaphore , 1970 ca
Acrylic on canvas
36“ diameter
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 24”
About Claire Blitz (1910-1998):
Claire Blitz’s life work showed a fascinating progression through time. As a young woman in New York City, she designed textiles at Countess Mara, and worked in batik, while painting early abstractions in oil. Later series in acrylic, painted in Washington D.C., include an Op Art Circle series, a Planetary series, (influenced by the moon walks of the day), and an enigmatic Egyptian series, often on shaped canvases.
Blitz’s exhibitions include the U.S. State Department and Congressional Offices, Baltimore Museum of Art, Decordova Museum, Howard University, National Institute of Health, Copley Society of Boston, Cosmos and Arts Clubs of Washington, the Austrian Embassy, and the Office of the District of Columbia Commissioner of the Arts.
Claire Blitz was born in Russia in 1910 and came to New York as a young girl. She was active in the New York Art Student’s League and the WPA Era in the 30’s. She received a Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship from the New York School of Applied Design for Women. She studied at Hunter College, and later, she would receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from George Washington University in D.C. Blitz also studied painting at the American University in Washington.
At the same time Claire managed to raise two families. She married the photographer Sam Brody in N.Y., and had two children, Mady and Julian, both of whom had their portraits painted by the famed painter Alice Neel. Claire moved to LA and worked in an aircraft plant in support of the war effort, and then returned to N.Y. She divorced Brody, and married Murray Blitz, an engineer, with whom she had three children, Marc, Valerie, and Ava, all born and raised in Washington D.C., where Murray worked. Claire also lived in New Mexico and Arizona. She died in California in 1998.
Claire Blitz’s paintings show an exciting personal, autobiographical, and universal growth, at a time when women artists did not receive their due.
