ARTISTS
Women and The Void: Abstract Expressionism on Paper
Women and the Void: Abstract Expressionism on Paper displays 21 works on paper by women working in abstraction between 1945 鈥� 1970.
Both the post-war action painters and the colour field Abstract Expressionists shared the same common belief: that following the war and the surrealist movement, abstract painting was able to achieve a transcendentalism that figurative painting could not. As Barnett Newman stated in 1948, 鈥業nstead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 鈥樷�榣ife鈥欌��, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings鈥�. How can we reconcile this narrative with a distinct lack of women and painters of colour in the canon?
The exhibition comes at a unique time when there is a burgeoning interest in the plight of twentieth-century female abstract artists, both amongst revisionist scholars and museum curators, popularised by Mary Gabriel鈥檚 2018 book, Ninth Street Women. Huxley-Parlour鈥檚 exhibition builds on a this project by focusing on works beyond painting: all works are on paper and at a smaller scale than is generally associated with Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition, too, explores the practises of women in abstraction beyond the mainstream big five.
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Women and the Void: Abstract Expressionism on Paper displays 21 works on paper by women working in abstraction between 1945 鈥� 1970.
Both the post-war action painters and the colour field Abstract Expressionists shared the same common belief: that following the war and the surrealist movement, abstract painting was able to achieve a transcendentalism that figurative painting could not. As Barnett Newman stated in 1948, 鈥業nstead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 鈥樷�榣ife鈥欌��, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings鈥�. How can we reconcile this narrative with a distinct lack of women and painters of colour in the canon?
The exhibition comes at a unique time when there is a burgeoning interest in the plight of twentieth-century female abstract artists, both amongst revisionist scholars and museum curators, popularised by Mary Gabriel鈥檚 2018 book, Ninth Street Women. Huxley-Parlour鈥檚 exhibition builds on a this project by focusing on works beyond painting: all works are on paper and at a smaller scale than is generally associated with Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition, too, explores the practises of women in abstraction beyond the mainstream big five.
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We were told that women were on the peripheries of the artistic movement, while in fact they were driving it forward, energetically engaging in this radical pictorial language.
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