Editorial: News of the Art World

25/03/16
Editorial: News of the Art World

Published in issue 20 (March/April 2016) of State magazine

Interview with Virgile Ittah

22/01/16

Interview: Virgile Ittah

Once you have seen the work of the London-based French artist Virgile Ittah (b1981, Paris), it is not something you will easily forget. Her life-size, haunting wax bodies, seemingly melting or decomposing as they lay collapsed across their metal bed frames or chairs, seek not to be sculptures, but to be human beings. Their transparency gives them an eerie, uncanny quality, and yet, in their abjection lies a beauty, perhaps a result of their inherent contradictions: fragility versus solidity, warmth versus coldness, life versus death.

Currently one of the 14 women artists in the Saatchi Gallery’s first all-women exhibition, Champagne Life, Ittah spoke to Studio International about her technique, her current collaboration with her partner, Kai Yoda, and her thoughts on the status of female artists today.

Read this interview here

Review of Champagne Life at the Saatchi Gallery

19/01/16

Champagne Life

Saatchi Gallery
13 January – 9 March 2016

Things are changing for female artists. For women generally, too, but the art world might just be the place where this first becomes visible. Although female artists are still markedly undervalued at auction, and have been described as “the bargains of our time” by Iwan Wirth (owner of leading international gallery Hauser & Wirth), 34-year-old artist Virgile Ittah suggests that this is the carry-over from last century and that, thanks to the work of their predecessors, young female artists today stand on a much more equal platform with their male counterparts.

Last year saw a series of solo retrospectives for female artists at both Tate galleries in London – Barbara Hepworth, Sonia Delaunay and Agnes Martin – and women are increasingly taking lead roles as gallery directors, curators and collectors, changing the way that contemporary art history is being written. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the Saatchi Gallery is hosting its first all-women exhibition, showcasing the work of 14 emerging international artists. The exhibition is described not as offering “an overarching vista of female artistic practice”, but rather playing “an important role in approaching issues of the glass ceiling that applies to the art world as much as to the world at large”. Whether or not this ceiling has yet been smashed remains to be seen over the next few decades, but judging by the confidence that imbues the works on display, this generation of female artists is certainly on the up.

Read the rest of this review here