Category Archives: WOMEN IN ART

Swirling masses of line seem to move through Georgiana Houghton’s art like loose threads or tangled masses of unruly hair. Now and again eyes or faces peep through their midst, meeting ours with a deep, penetrating gaze. A visionary artist and medium with remarkable foresight, Houghton pioneered an expressive language of abstraction that was well…

Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is one of the 20th century art world’s best-kept secrets. An abstract painter of extraordinary talent and foresight, she pioneered a deeply spiritual strand of abstraction centering around Theosophy, spirits, seances, and the occult long before her male counterparts like Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kasimir Malevich. Yet she kept…

Jenny Saville’s raw and physically direct paintings are all about the true reality of human bodies. Flesh is her primary subject, and she paints it creasing, flopping, squishing and folding over itself in a way that is all too familiar to anyone who has given birth, or experienced the visceral process of raising young children….

Personal relationships were integral to the pioneering 20th century sculptor Louise Bourgeois, so perhaps it is no surprise that themes of motherhood crept into many of her most famous works of art. Whether addressing her relationship with her own mother, who died when the artist was 21, or her own shifting role as she herself…

Photographs of the young Cecily Brown show a glowering woman covered in paint, hair tousled and eyes lined in darkness. In the 1990s she was the quintessential female rebel, grabbing the mantle of the tortured male painter and subverting it for her own ends. Her erotic, expressionist art spoke of raw energy and sexuality from…

There is a chaotic, frenetic energy in Phyllida Barlow’s art, as piles of painted wood lean this way and that, and huge heaps of fabric are bundled into balls and strung up on the gallery walls. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Barlow is a mother of four – this free-spirited playfulness seems to conjure…

In 2014, Kazakh artist Saule Suleimenova took a trip out of Almaty and realised that the steppes – which one imagines wild and unspoiled – were covered in plastic bags. She immediately abandoned all her materials and produced her first plastic ‘painting’, a beautiful bouquet of flowers made entirely out of discarded shopping bags glued…

“I paint flesh because I’m human. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.” Jenny Saville’s voluptuous, rippling folds of flesh explore the living, breathing human experience. On one hand she is a painter’s painter, who relishes in the messy, smeary liquidity of oil paint, but she also draws parallels between the sensuality of painting and…

“I want the story to be told so that people understand what’s going on.” Above all else, Faith Ringgold is an avid, entrancing storyteller, weaving the darker side of African American history into her richly complex works of art. Though her practice spans a broad range of media, she is perhaps best known for her…