Category Archives: PIONEERS

“Success, for me, is staying true to who you are and not deviating off a path.” Amy Sherald’s striking, visually arresting portraits capture the indefinable spirit of contemporary America. Since painting Michelle Obama’s portrait in 2018, the press were quick to portray her as an overnight success, but this undermines the strength, determination and years…

“I am looking for that space where you can’t have that singular, particular experience. It’s about what is undefined, unstable – and for me, that’s important politically.” Spidery lines whisper skeletal, architectural structures, coloured streaks swoop and swirl and ink blots become darkened clouds of soot and smoke: this is the electrifyingly complex landscape of…

“Painting is closest to poetry of all the arts: not being able to explain something, why does one thing sound so great next to another? You can’t put your finger on it, that’s what my work’s about.” Cecily Brown’s paintings pulsate with fleshy indulgence as thickly painted bodies writhe into and over one another, caught…

“The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.” Brutal, shocking and filled with tragedy, Kara Walker’s re-telling of black history aims for the jugular. The artist made her name with cut out silhouettes illustrating bloody, violent acts inflicted upon America’s black population, particularly women, during the American…

“Repetition and revision is central to my working process, this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and recoveries.” Ellen Gallagher is a minimalist at heart, arranging tight grids and decorative repeat patterns that echo the measured abstractions of Sol LeWitt or Agnes Martin. But lean in closer; woven tightly into the fabric…

“My work has affected people over the years … because it draws people’s attention to … the things in their lives. There’s a certain amount of humility that goes with that.” Rachel Whiteread’s ghostly sculptures transform empty, forgotten space into solid mass. Drawing us to unusual, forgotten places is her forte, from the dark recesses of a childhood cupboard, the dusty space under the…

“It’s important to express oneself… provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.” The act of seeing is central to Berthe Morisot’s practice – both tangible, visible subjects and simmering psychological tensions beneath. With a canny, perceptive eye she captured scenes and people from 19th century Parisian life, famously painting women…

“There is no beauty, if it doesn’t show some of the terribleness of life.” Dark eyes fall into pits of despair, a shaky, misshapen hand muffles a scream and a deathly pale face seems to catch its last breath of air; such is the hauntingly compelling world of Marlene Dumas. “I’m not good at making…

“What did I love? What was it that meant the very most to me inside my very own self? The fields and trees and fences and boards and lattices of my childhood rushed across my inner eye as if borne by a great, strong wind.” Memories colour Anne Truitt’s art, as past experiences become towering…

“I never violate an inner rhythm. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have regards for the inner voice.” Tense, violent and shockingly bright, Lee Krasner’s abstract canvases vibrate with pulsating rhythm as if lost in their own inner tempo. Krasner was a force of…

“Paintings … germinate like a seed; in the dark soil and recesses of the living coral of the mind… They grow like a plant, slowly putting out shoots, they need pruning, meditating on, while the roots grow in the dark.” Eileen Agar was a free spirit, weaving her vibrant and endlessly experimental life into art….

Rachel Ruysch’s intricate, exquisitely detailed paintings are hidden worlds of wonder and discovery. Beneath lavish, gorgeously decadent flower and fruit displays lie the darker side of nature, as petals decay and reptilian insects emerge from the shadows into the glistening light, threatening to devour them. Like many women artists of the Dutch Golden Age Ruysch…

“…the strokes of the hammer on the chisel have to be in time with your heartbeat or pulse.” Barbara Hepworth’s name is synonymous with smooth, monolithic forms resembling human bodies or careworn sea-lashed rocks. Today she is recognised as one of Britain’s foremost Modernist sculptors, part of a generation exploring post-war abstraction with a hard-won,…

“I hated conventional art. I began to live.” Mary Cassatt was a painter’s painter, capturing her subjects with open, fluid brushstrokes loaded with energy and life. Rising to prominence in 19th century Paris, style was as radical as content, as bold brushstrokes and dazzling colours captured the minutiae of ordinary life with the rapid eye…