WOMEN ARTISTS: A CONVERSATION
THE FINE ART SOCIETY
Selling art and design since 1876 148 New Bond Street | London W1S 2JT +44 (0)20 7629 5116 | www.thefineartsociety.com Enquiries: Sara Terzi, sara@thefineartsociety.com
6 - 28 FEBRUARY 2017
ARTISTS: A CONVERSATION
When I first came across the artist Gluck, one of the things that struck me most was her determined attitude towards how she was represented: she insisted on being addressed simply as Gluck ˝no prefix, suffix or quote˝, and she demanded to have only ‘one man shows’. This was a position that she maintained from her very first exhibition at The Fine Art Society in 1926, until her last one in 1973. As we approached the idea of showing her work in the gallery again, I could not help but think about the peculiar position of this woman exhibiting in a male dominated world. What has (or hasn’t) changed since Gluck’s lifetime? Gender inequality in the art world has become a major topic of debate over the past century, and the means of discovering and validating women’s place in art history has been more and more frequently discussed. The matter is both deceptively simple and remarkably complex. A key point of contention has often been the question of how to even begin to tackle this issue: should we allow
the use of the label ‘woman’ when talking about an artist, as Georgia O’Keefe, Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, among others, famously contested? Why have there been so few great women artists in our history, as Linda Nochlin provocatively asked in 1971? Why is there still so little work by women in museum collections, as the Guerilla Girls pointed out in their Report Card in 1986 and again in 2016? In the spirit of Gluck’s strong sense of individuality, this exhibition intends to show that there is no single standard for what we consider a ‘woman’ artist and asks what the significance of staging an all women show is in 2016. Phoebe Boswell, Eileen Cooper, Jennifer Durrant, Vanessa Jackson, Annie Kevans, Susie MacMurray, Annie Morris, Ishbel Myerscough, Cathie Pilkington, Geraldine Swayne, Bettina Von Zwehl and Caroline Walker work in a wide range of mediums, styles and genres that represent a cross-section of the diverse work produced by women in today’s art scene.
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Programmed to run alongside the 6th exhibition at The Fine Art Society of work by Gluck, this exhibition has an open as well as specific aim. Instead of collective direction or a curatorial push to say any one thing, however, this selection of domestic, functional, private, abstract, descriptive, discursive and decorative work by 12 artists presents a generous range of activity, experience and realisation. Would Gluck, such a distinct person, welcome this? She was both selfish and selfless, the creator of fiercely autonomous artwork. Her stridently independent personal history, her social life blurred by isolation and her occasional return to society makes for a bundle of contradictions. The conflicting metaphor of Gluck’s life work runs parallel to the function of this exhibition; works may function on their own, or in terms of each other. For Gluck, the public and the personal merge and then separate. Stepping outside the communal, social and familial expectations of the time she attempted to make and control her own context - funnily enough she never once chose to exhibit her work in a mixed show. For decades The Fine Art Society has remained exceptional in the way it combines gallery and showroom. An understandable place to see art, as well as perhaps a place to re-consider it. With pieces often on tables as if in a house, the gallery has a domestic sense and scale to it, which literally mimics both interior and exterior expectations for art, a particularly pre-Modern relation to scale and function. Ishbel Myerscough paints herself and her children as well as more formal portraits. Her paintings have a high level of detail that flattens the image as the eye skips and builds a somewhat staged process of comprehension. We have a flow reminiscent of Flemish or certain Northern Italian Renaissance painting, where each strand of hair has energy yet the figure becomes still. The recent self-portrait, mixing confidence with doubt, has the painter in a boldy patterned highstreet dress of not massively expensive material.
The current but retrospective design is rendered with a hard glare that brings it all back to the present, to the relationship the artist has with herself. A virtuoso appointment with truth that combines fine observation with generality. Again, shifting backwards and forwards in terms of stylistic familiarity, Bettina Von Zwehl brings the structure and mores of miniature portrait painting - and therefore that tradition shifted into early photography - to a somewhat disturbed and repetitious set of questions. From a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum she makes a series of works that depend on expectation, and association, not innocent in their need for physical attention. Jennifer Durrant makes abstract painting that carries a sideways, assured sub-plot - stepping her surface back, with no retinal play but instead into a contained logical world. First of all the range of surface and depth to the colour is unusual. Durrant builds - with apparently simple structure - presences that she expects to work all at once from top to bottom and side to side. The often opaque colour is registered, recalibrated over time with great concentration to make sure the simple idea of a performing image is replaced by something else. Vanessa Jackson’s geometric works hint at the philosophical nature of sense, a world rationalised, broken and ironed out again. But of course, the point is not just to use the pace of colour and touch of paint to render the invisible visible, but to see what it can bring. Jackson, disciplined, imbued with the marriage of philosophy and geometry, shows a couple of paintings here that are both spatial and shallow. Colour is apparently contradictory as she fights against her own expectations as well as those of others, making the negative positive and the other way around. Neither restful not difficult, the painting makes a questioningly playful manifestation of language. So, inside and outside, the body and exterior, work here is painted, photographed, observed
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and made up, and in the case of Cathie Pilkington uses objects that fit in terms of context. Pilkington’s sculptural pieces - part souvenir, part objets trouvés - cement an already established ambiguity of scale. She uses the found element, breaks it up, keeps it intact, but elevates sections to different levels of meaning and function - a world of in-between art, strange scale, a world within a world. Pilkington’s collage plays with exactly the same associative mesh of value and recognition that brings all of the work up to the current, to knowing, away from simply undermining expectation to building something different to do with the role of the camera, self promotion and self consciousness. For decades Eileen Cooper has been telling a particular story about her expectation from painting; its tone and ambition. Familiar but insistent she uses each canvas as a holding pool or bay. We look in through a range of scale, to the edge of a skirt, perhaps, the body, and a shifting dance of a general nature. Automatic rules and the expectations of timelessness, of forever, overpower any notion of immediate statement. This is not history; there is no declaration of moment, no particular event to recall. Instead, Cooper makes a space across both time and surface to place women - who go through a range of gesture - the painted surface likened to skin, their state one of existence, not day to day but general and therefore political. Here by referring to Gluck’s one time partner Constance Spry, in particular, Cooper allows the world to enter but then asks it to leave. Annie Morris makes sculpture with free standing balls of different circumference piled one on top of the other. The colour is simple in range, the intention of it all one of apparently questioning the role of the work in the first place. Outline makes a presence with non-imagery, and it feels like sculpture as notional play where all seems to remain in the role of diagram, and still despite physical fact to be more suggestive than actual. But subject, as such, is difficult, more about the sense that women artists were often
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expected to reflect upon their own situation. The greatest freedom is not to say any thing, or to be able to speak or subvert the same or a different language. The range of work in this exhibition is deliberately subtle; calls for attention are deflected and often denied. Susie MacMurray uses mass to create mass, the significance of the light source, the light bulb, is just nowhere, but references to earlier radical female art imagery is extended here and seen and felt and understood as something that can also be turned off at night, after everyone has gone.
show is about a cross wired cross referencing where much is happening or has already happened. Annie Kevans’s touching series of women in art history is disarmingly literal. By representing she is respecting, but also questioning the power of drawing itself to touch on subject. This notion could take the form of a list of names, or a list of images, but the artist draws and paints at the same time as a form of evocation, a way of holding on to what has already happened, and conjuring what might otherwise not have been seen.
A sort of retrospective gaze at a complex notion of role is at play in Caroline Walker’s paintings – which are both inside a place, with optimism, and outside - in layers of perfected photo shopped representation. Walker conjures the false expectation of the show-home, a perfect circumstance in which it is difficult to relax, seen as if from the outside, as if through glass. The painting is touching, loose and impressionistic, as if the paint itself is on its way through and does not stay: someone else’s idea of what you want inevitably makes you feel unwelcome.
‘Strangers in the Village’ is made up of images of photographs that Phoebe Boswell drew of men who made contact with her through Tinder at one particularly lonely time. The drawings, making up a sort of flight map of destination, represent that transient, faint, stuttering non communication, and attitude, all so predictably samey. Boswell is there on her own, a solitary artist on a residency in the very undiverse city of Guttenberg. Along with the messages, written directly on to the wall, are pictures of the men who have responded to an image of her, in the centre. Boswell portrays a criss-cross of awkward, simplistic and stereotypical expectations that were channelled and projected onto her - the solitary female artist who in turn answers back by drawing and not seeing them for real.
Geraldine Swayne’s painting is even more markedly about a gathering of stroke and material, a sort of fluidity and looseness that builds a huge portrait. Painters talk of finding things in their work, and Swayne’s whole relation to portraiture appears to be one of finding people. Hovering between constructed image and the representative her series of small drawings show how meaning can erupt out of material and not the other way around. Automatic writing is replaced by automatic drawing, figures blur and merge and do strange things to each other. Nothing is necessarily sinister, however, and the process of making means that fluid and even arbitrary meaning can arrive. Deliberately full, asking for attention to be divided every direction, this exhibition avoids, perhaps, the sense of expectation for subject and the equally galling projection of a simple forced narrative. The notion of Woman’s Art has a good history but now it is also hard to hold on. This
Women artists are generally still under-supported and under-represented but what does it mean to mount an exhibition of work by women artists, now? This exhibition of course appears to say many powerful things, to provide a mass of approach in terms of the experience it gives, but in what way do general considerations touch, reflect, enhance the experience of individual work? The contradiction between an overview and the manifestation of individual pursuit will always be there. To write generally about women artists is fundamental and important, yet akin to saying that the sky is sometimes blue, mainly black and often grey, and that is true for half the world. December 2016
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The Likeness Project, 2016 Pencil on paper 23 x 25 cm each NEXT
Stranger in the Village (GBG) (Detail), 2015 Pencil on paper, handwritten text Dimensions variable
Sixty-one Likes
Seventy-one Likes
A Hundred and twenty-one Likes
Fifty-three Likes
PHOEBE BOSWELL 8
Thirty-four Likes
Seventy Likes
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Constance Spry, 2015 Pastel, conte and ink 92.5 x 61 cm RIGHT
Night Music, 2015 Oil on canvas 153 x 122 cm
EILEEN COOPER 12
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Blue Sky Thinking, 2016 Oil on canvas 76 x 107 cm RIGHT
Hour of the Rose, 2016 Oil on canvas 76 x 56 cm
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A Few Dots, Sights to Sing (from the Ghirlandia Series), 2014 Acrylic on canvas 100 x 100 cm
JENNIFER DURRANT 16
LEFT
After Latvia, Rothko (from the Ghirlandia Series), 2014 Acrylic on canvas 100 x 100 cm
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Breathing Space, 2016 Oil on canvas 214 x 183 cm RIGHT
Balancing Act, 2016 Oil on canvas 214 x 183 cm
VANESSA JACKSON 18
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Romaine Brooks, 2016
From the series Women and the History of Art Oil on paper 40 x 30 cm RIGHT
Gluck, 2016
Women and the History of Art From the series Women and the History of Art Oil on paper 40 x 30 cm
ANNIE KEVANS 20
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Here Come the Girls, 2016 700 wine glasses, lipstick Dimensions variable
SUSIE MACMURRAY 22
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Flower Head 1, 2016 Oil stick on paper 82 x 22.5 x 6.5 cm RIGHT
Stack 10, Ultramarine Blue Light, 2016 Plaster, sand, raw pigment 320 cm high
ANNIE MORRIS 24
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Self Portrait in a Flower Dress, 2016 Oil on canvas 61 x 45.7 cm RIGHT
Girl, 2016
Oil on canvas 151 x 80.5 cm
ISHBEL MYERSCOUGH 26
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Northern Landscape, 2014
Painted bronze, synthetic wig 21 x 40 x 30 cm | edition of 3 + 2APs RIGHT
Exquisite Corpse, 2015 Paper, fabric, paint 100 x 60 cm
CATHIE PILKINGTON 28
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Reclining Doll, 2013
Oil paint on patinated bronze 43 x 77 x 40 cm | edition of 3 + 2APs
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Camilla Horn, 2012 Acrylic on canvas 213.4 x 106.7 cm NEXT
Science-fiction Victorian series, 2013 Ink, watercolour and pastel on paper 29.7 x 21 cm each
GERALDINE SWAYNE 32
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Sophia II, 2011
From the series Made Up Love Songs C-type print | edition of 5 5.8 cm image diameter | 16.5 x 16.5 cm framed
BETTINA VON ZWEHL 36
LEFT
Irini II and Irini, 2011
C-type print | edition of 5 5.8 cm image diameter | 16.5 x 16.5 cm framed
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Scherzo di Follia III, 2015 C-type print | edition of 10 13.4 x 9.6 cm (framed)
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Tallulah and Jasmine, 2015 C-type print | edition of 10 13.4 x 9.6 cm (framed)
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Study for Separates II, 2015 Oil on paper 30 x 27 cm RIGHT
Afters Study, 2016 Oil on paper 34 x 49 cm
Study for Home Visit, 2016 Oil on paper 42 x 56.5 cm
CAROLINE WALKER 40
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Full Set Colour Gels, 2016 Oil on linen 85 x 110 cm
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Phoebe Boswell was born in 1982 in Nairobi, Kenya to a Kikuyu mother and a fourth generation British Kenyan father. Raised in the Middle East, she moved to London in 2000. Boswell studied at the Slade School of Art and at Central St. Martins College of Art. Her work has featured in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London; the National Gallery, London; the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; and the Witteveen Visual Art Centre, Amsterdam, amongst others. In 2012, Boswell was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship and was shortlisted for the Art Foundation’s Animation Fellowship. She was awarded the Blå Stället and GIBCA residencies in Gothenberg, Sweden, and was named artist-in-residence at the Florence Trust, London in 2015. Boswell’s animation work has been nominated for numerous awards including Best Film in the British Animation Awards Public Choice twice. Eileen Cooper was born in 1953 in Glossop, near Manchester. She studied at Goldsmiths College and later at the Royal College of Art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Castlefield Art Gallery, Manchester; Artsite, Bath; Benjamin Rhodes Gallery, London; and a touring show of graphics to Darlington, Harrogate and Scarborough Art Galleries. In 2000, Dulwich Picture Gallery hosted ‘Raw Material’, a major exhibition of Cooper’s paintings and drawings based on a two-year residency during which she worked with their historic collection. She has taught at several institutions including Central St. Martins, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal Academy Schools. Cooper was elected Royal Academician in 2000 and in 2010 she became the first woman to be elected as Keeper of the Royal Academy since its inception in 1768. Jennifer Durrant was born in Brighton in 1942, but presently lives and works between London and Umbria, Italy. She studied first at the Brighton College of Art and then at the Slade School of Art. Durrant was awarded a scholarship to the British School at Rome in 1965 and the following year she was a Peter Stuyvesant Prize Winner at the Young Contemporaries exhibition. She has since exhibited her work in numerous group and solo shows in London at the Royal Academy, the Barbican and the Serpentine Gallery. In 1979, Durrant was the first woman artist in residence at Oxford University, and in September 2009 Durrant was invited by the Mark Rothko Foundation, to participate in a two week International Plein Air event in Latvia. Her work features in several major museum collections, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Neue Galerie, Aachen; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Durrant is a fellow of the Royal College of Art and was elected a Royal Academician in 1994. Vanessa Jackson was born in 1953 in Peaslake, England. She studied at St. Martins College of Art and subsequently at the Royal College of Art. She was President of the New Contemporaries in 1975 and undertook the Yaddo Residency in New York in 1985 and 1991. She was chair and then patron for Brazier’s International Artists Workshops until 2013. Her paintings have been widely exhibited in the UK and abroad. She won The Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist for the RA’s Summer Exhibition in 2015 and was elected a Royal Academician that same year. Jackson has served as Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art, as MA and Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art and as a Senior Tutor at the RA Schools. She is presently on the Edwin Austin Abbey Council and the British School at Rome Fine Art Faculty, for which she was previously awarded the Abbey Fellowship in 1995. Annie Kevans was born in Cannes, France in 1972 to British parents. She holds a BA from Central St. Martins School of Art & Design. She has had several solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society, London; James Danziger Gallery, New York; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco; and Volta, New York. Her work has also been exhibited in a number of group shows, including ones at the Victoria & Albert Museum and at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Kevans was selected as a finalist for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2006 and for the Women of the Future awards the following year. In 2014 she was commissioned by french designer Jean Paul Gautier to create a new series of works for a worlwide touring
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exhibition produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Her work can be found in major private and pulic collections including the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, the David Roberts Collection, London, the Saatchi Collection, London. Susie MacMurray was born in London in 1959. Formerly a professional classical musician, she trained as a visual artist at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1997-2001. Since thenn, solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Agnew’s Gallery, London; Danese/Corey, New York; and Thomas Williams Gallery, London. Her work has also been exhibited in many group shows, including ones at Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She has been commissioned to produce site-specific installations for several museums and historic monuments, most notably for the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; York St Mary’s for the York Museums Trust; the Florence Nightingale Museum, London; the Manchester Art Gallery; and a permanent installation at the Venetian Arsenale in Venice. She was shortlisted for the National Museum of Women Artists’ Women to Watch (2012), the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2005), and the Crosby Homes Art Prize (2003). Annie Morris was born in London in 1978. She studied at Central St. Martins College of Art, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the Slade School of Art. In 2000 she won the Homer Scholarship Award, and in 2002, she received an award for her drawing skills from the École des Beaux Arts. Her art practice includes paintings, sculptures, and collages, though she first came to prominence in 2003 for her collaboration with her longtime friend Sophie Dahl (granddaughter of the British children’s author Roald Dahl) on the illustrations for the book ‘Man with the Dancing Eyes’. Morris was offered her first gallery show the same year, and she has since exhibited in London, New York, Los Angeles and Milan among others. Her works were also featured in several public instituations, most notably at The Royal Academy, London; Baku MoMA, Azerbaijan; and Tate Gallery, St Ives. Ishbel Myerscough was born in London in 1968. She attended the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Anthony Mould, London and Flowers Gallery, New York. Myerscough’s work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions, most notably at Turner Contemporary, Margate; Browse & Darby, London; and at the National Portrait Gallery, including an acclaimed collaborative exhibition with Chantal Joffe titled ‘Friendship Portraits’. Myerscough was a three-time minor prizewinner in the annual BP Portrait Award Competition at the National Portrait Gallery before winning the first prize in 1995. She was subsequently commissioned to paint Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Peter Strawson, and Sir Willard Wentworth White’s portraits for the collection (in 1998, 2005, and 2010, respectively). She was awarded the Robert and Susan Summers Residency in 1995.
Geraldine Swayne’s multifaceted career has spanned film, music, and painting. After studying fine art at Newcastle and Kingston Universities, she won a Northern Arts Travel award. Since 1999, she has made numerous experimental films including the world’s first super-8 to Imax film ‘East End’. She joined experimental rock group ‘…bender’ in 2005 and, in the following year, the group ‘Faust’ with whom she has recorded two albums and toured widely, making musical improvisations and live paintings at venues such as the Wexner Centre for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and CalArts, Valencia, California. Her paintings have been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in London and New York, most notably at the Barbican, London. In 2010 she was a finalist in the John Moores painting prize, Walker Gallery, Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a residency at Acme Fire Station in East London. Bettina von Zwehl was born in Munich in 1971. She holds a BA in Photography from the London College of Printing and an MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art. Von Zwehl has held solo exhibitions of her work both in the UK and internationally, including venues such as the Fotogaleriet, Oslo; the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood, London; the Photographer’s Gallery, London; and Galleria Laura Pecci, Milan. Her work has also featured in group shows in London, Munich, New York, Brussels, Madrid, Vienna. Von Zwehl was awarded the Photography Residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2011, and has since been awarded artist residencies at The Freud Museum, London (2014), and the Bahuslan Museum in Uddevalla, Sweden (2015). Her work is held in many international collections including the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Caroline Walker was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1982. She studied figurative painting and life drawing at the Glasgow School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art. She was a recipient of the Dewar Arts Award in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Threadneedle Prize in 2010. Walker’s work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions, including the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Marlborough Fine Art, London; Alan Cristea Gallery, New York; ProjectB Gallery, Milan; and Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam among others. Walker’s work is in several international collections including the Jimenez-Colon Collection, the Franks-Suss Collection, the Saatchi Collection, and the Woong Yeul Lee Collection.
Cathie Pilkington was born in Manchester in 1968. She studied silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art and was awarded the first John Watson Prize for Art upon graduating. She then went on to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art and was subsequently awarded the Cheltenham Fine Art Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including the Edinburgh Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Royal Academy, London, and the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood, London. Pilkington has taught at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Art. In 2014, Pilkington won the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist at the RA’s summer exhibition and was elected a Royal Academician the same year. In 2016 she became the Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools. Her work is held in several prominent collections, including the David Roberts Collection, London and Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester.
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Published by The Fine Art Society for the exhibition Women Artists: A Conversation held at 148 New Bond Street, London W1, from 6th to 28th February 2017 ISBN 978-1-907052-75-0 Catalogue © The Fine Art Society Images © The Artists Introduction © Sacha Craddock All rights reserved Designed and typeset in Avenir Next by Sara Terzi Printed in Belgium by Albe DeCoker With special thanks to: Flowers Gallery, Thomas Lighton, Purdy Hicks Gallery
THE FINE ART SOCIETY
Selling art and design since 1876 148 New Bond Street | London W1S 2JT +44 (0)20 7629 5116 | www.thefineartsociety.com Enquiries: Sara Terzi sara@thefineartsociety.com
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The Fine Art Society
Selling art and design since 1876