Interview with Joana Vasconcelos

04/08/20

Interview with Joana Vasconcelos

Published in full in edition 2 of The Flux Review

Interview with VALIE EXPORT

13/12/19

Interview: VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT (b1940, Linz, Austria) is one of the most significant artists in the field of performance and new media, and has been awarded the 2019 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Her career, which spans five decades, has been pioneering in film, video and installation art. However, she is probably best known for her groundbreaking Aktions and performances of the late 1960s and 1970s, which introduced a new radical form of feminist art to Europe. 

In 1980, EXPORT represented Austria at the 39th Venice Biennale (alongside Maria Lassnig). For her first exhibition at London’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, this installation has been brought to the UK, and is every bit as powerful now as four decades ago. 

Read the full interview here

Review of Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital Hauser & Wirth, London

18/07/17

Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital

Hauser & Wirth, London
19 May – 29 July 2017

In 1969, Ida Horowitz (b1929), a struggling artist and mother of four, recently moved from Chicago to San Diego, was driving her two young sons to the zoo when suddenly she felt herself unravelling. She was unable to tell red from green, and her children had to guide her through set upon set of traffic lights. Later that day, recognising the danger, she checked herself into the mental health ward of Mercy Hospital.

Ida – who went on to become the internationally successful feminist artist Ida Applebroog (a made-up surname adopted when she felt the need to distance herself from both her maiden name, Appelbaum, and her married name, Horowitz) – had with her a sketchbook. During her six-week stay on the ward, she filled this with drawings and scribbled thoughts, and it is these excavations of her mind that now – after 40 years buried in a basement locker, until they were rediscovered by an studio assistant in 2009 – fill the walls of Hauser & Wirth London’s south gallery in a revealing and insightful show.

Read the review here

Review of Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts at the Whitechapel Gallery

24/01/17

Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Whitechapel Gallery, London

18 January – 16 April 2017

“Presentations of work by women artists are usually accompanied by sob stories and violins,” says Kathryn Wat, chief curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington DC – the only international museum dedicated to the exhibition, preservation and acquisition of works by women artists of all nationalities and periods. She continues: “They tell how women couldn’t get into academies, couldn’t get sponsorship, but, nevertheless, went on to achieve. But, with photography, it’s different because women have been at the forefront of this medium since the very beginning.” The one-room display at the Whitechapel Gallery, Terrains of the Body, co-curated by Wat, presents photography and video works from the NMWA collection, as part of the London gallery’s programme of opening up rarely seen collections from around the world. Building on the legacy of 1970s’ feminist art, the exhibition includes works by 17 contemporary artists from five continents, from the 80s to today, presenting woman as creator and subject of her work.

Read the review here

Interview with Marie Yates

12/07/16

Interview: Marie Yates

Some Dimensions of my Lunch: Conceptual Art in Britain (1956-1979). Part 2: Marie Yates 

Richard Saltoun Gallery

24 June - 22 July 2016

Marie Yates (b1940) graduated from Manchester Regional College of Art in 1959. After a period spent producing abstract paintings in St Ives, she returned to study fine art at Hornsey College of Art (1968-71). During this time, she was strongly influenced by the writings of Lucy Lippard and Yoko Ono and the beginnings of conceptual art. She began to produce her Field Workings – photographic and text works, documenting journeys or “procedures” in the countryside – and, in 1979, she made Image/woman/text (after Roland Barthes), exploring social preconceptions about photographic images of women, the way they are made, and their meanings.

In June 1977, Fenella Crichton wrote in Studio International: “Marie Yates is a woman working with landscape. Radical ideas do not fit easily into this framework, because we are deeply riddled with prejudices about both women and landscape, and as a result she has been widely misinterpreted.” This misinterpretation, sadly, seems to persist. Yates’s work is currently being exhibited at Richard Saltoun as part of the gallery’s conceptual art series, but the artist remains wary of labels. For her, art is key to social change and ought to form part of a larger discourse, critically engaging the mind.

Read the interview here

Interview with Judy Chicago

12/09/15
Interview: Judy Chicago

Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker
14 September - 31 December 2015

The World Goes Pop
Tate Modern
17 September 2015 - 24 January 2016

In 1968, Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939) chose not to participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center because she didn’t want to show in any group defined as “women”, “Jewish” or “California”. A couple of years later, however, she coined the term “feminist art” and she then went on to become known worldwide for her epic $250,000 installation, The Dinner Party (1979) – a large triangular table, measuring 48ft by 43ft by 36ft (14.6 metres by 13 metres by 11 metres), with 39 place settings, each commemorating a historical or mythical female figure. Throughout her career, Chicago has been an outspoken advocate for female artists and has written, taught and co-founded educational establishments in a bid to put an end to what she terms the “institutional failure in our universities and museums to teach the history of feminist art”.

In 2011, the Pacific Standard Time project at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, brought attention to a lot of Chicago’s early work and reminded people that there is more to her than her iconic place settings. The following year, she had a show at Riflemaker in London, and the year after that, she was included in the Spotlight section – a section for artists whom the curator deems to have been overlooked and deserving of re-evaluation – of Frieze Masters, also in London.

Read the rest of this interview here

Interview with Lynda Benglis at the Hepworth Wakefield

16/02/15

Lynda Benglis

The Hepworth Wakefield

6 February – 1 July 2015

Lynda Benglis is perhaps best-known for the fame and notoriety she achieved when, in 1974, she placed a full-colour advertisement in ArtForum magazine, consisting of a nude photograph of herself with a large latex dildo. A reaction to the phallocentrism of the contemporary art world, it certainly caused a stir.

Her oeuvre, however, is much wider than merely overt feminist gestures, as visitors to this enthralling 50-work survey show at the Hepworth Wakefield – the first to take place in a UK institution – will discover.

Describing her 3D sculptural pieces as paintings which have escaped from the frame of the canvas, Benglis was heralded in the 60s as the “heir to Pollock”, when she began creating her so-called Fallen Paintings, pouring liquid plastic on to the floor and against the walls.  She is a lover of a wide range of materials – bronze, polyurethane, glitter, paper and film, to name but a few – and she has studios across the globe in New York, New Mexico, Greece and India.

Throughout her career, the 73-year-old artist has made a concerted effort to push against any definition and to resist categorisation. “I think artists create their own rules,” she says. “Or break them.”

To watch the interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/lynda-benglis-video-interview-hepworth-wakefield