10 Exhibitions By Female Artists You Can't Miss This Summer
One of ‘The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist’, reads the Guerrilla Girls 1988 manifesto, is “not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius”. Such wry, subversive humour has long-defined the work of women and non-binary artists, who fight against the boys’ club of the art world to represent their bodies, vision and stories themselves. The good news? This summer is packed full with exhibitions of the work of the fairer sex, with names young and old, emerging and established all on offer. Here’s Vogue’s edit of the 10 art shows you simply can’t miss in 2018.
Jenny Saville: NOW
Jenny Saville doesn’t so much paint the human form as sculpt out flesh with oils and charcoal. Her large-scale images of un-idealised, voluptuous bodies have earned Saville comparisons with Lucian Freud, but her gaze is pointedly female, with paintings such as ‘Trace’ (1993) depicting the imprints of underwear on a woman’s back. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, this is the first museum exhibition of Saville’s work to be shown in Scotland and includes new and old work from the past 26 years, alongside other contemporary artists whose work also explores themes such as the corporeal, gender and performance.
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up
When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, ordered her wardrobe to be sealed away until 15 years after his own death. It was uncovered in 2004, and this postscript only heightens the mythology of Kahlo’s now iconic and much admired style. With traditional embroidered Mexican garments, kodachrome photographs and her original beauty products all on display, the V&A’s upcoming exhibition of the Mexican artist’s apparel helps to decode her artwork and life. As the red-booted prosthetic leg in the show reminds us in particular, clothing was performative and transformative for Kahlo, who suffered from debilitating illnesses and physical problems throughout her life.
Beatriz Milhazes: Rio Azul
Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes’s riotous but meticulously-ordered collages combine the optical games of Bridget Riley and the flat paper cut-outs of Matisse with the semi-circular patterning of Sonia Delaunay. A current show at Bermondsey’s White Cube is the first large-scale exhibition of Milhazes’s work in the UK, and includes her multimedia collages alongside her installations, sculpture, as well as her first foray into tapestry. Championing a bold, floral and feminized aesthetic, her work also pays homage to her Latin American heritage with references to carnival and folk culture.
A Woman's Place
Despite being an only child, due to the patriarchal laws of lineage the Bloomsbury Set writer and poet Vita Sackville-West was unable to inherit her beloved ancestral home, Knole. Instead, it was passed onto her uncle (to her great distress). It’s an irony that undercuts A Woman’s Place, an exhibition at Knole this summer, but doesn’t entirely undermine it. An exhibition of art to mark 100 years of female suffrage, and to tell women’s stories, six contemporary female artists including Lubaina Himid, CJ Mahony, Lindsay Seers, Emily Speed, Alice May Williams and Melanie Wilson were commissioned to create imaginative works that commemorate the lives of the women who lived there.
