Women Abstract Painters - Whitechapel Spring 2023 Part 1

MATERIAL

PROCESS

TIME

The works grouped here show artists exploring the materiality of paint in its own right. The canvas becomes a laboratory where pigment is diluted and layered or allowed to take on a life of its own through splashes, dribbles and stains. Paint may be laid on thickly and shaped like a sculptural form. It is made analogous with the world through the incorporation of found materials such as mud, rags, sawdust, resin, paint tubes and even cigarette ash. The surface of the painting becomes mutable, shaped by violent acts or tender, intimate gestures revealing the processes of their making alongside chance, accident and the passage of time.

The contributions of women have long been marginalised in modern art. The paintings presented here demonstrate how women across the world were fundamental in evolving the story of abstraction, incorporating experiences of turbulent social change into their work and promoting freedom of expression. These women were striving and succeeding artistically in overwhelmingly male contexts but, for various reasons - namely around how art history has been recorded - have been neglected in comparison to their male peers.

On occasion, throughout this exhibition, it has felt necessary to include the names of some of the male artists that these women were working alongside as a way of emphasising their exclusion from the most frequently told stories of art.

The exhibition focuses on five themes: paint as material and process, symbolic languages drawn from myth and ritual, abstraction as an expression of the self, painting as movement and dance, and the canvas as environment.

Artists in this show

MARY ABBOTT

ETEL ADNAN

MALIKEH AFNAN

RUTH ARMER

GILLIAN AYRES

IDA BARBARIGO

NOEMÍ DI BENEDETTO

ANNA-EVA BERGMAN

JANICE BIALA

BERNICE BING

SANDRA BLOW

DUSTI BONGÉ

CHINYEE

WOOK-KYUNG CHOI

JAY DEFEO

MARTHA EDELHEIT

AMARANTH EHRENHALT

ASMA FAYOUMI

LILLY FENICHEL

PERLE FINE

ELSE FISCHER-HANSEN

AUDREY FLACK

ELNA FONNESBECH-SANDBERG

JUANA FRANCÉS

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

SONIA GECHTOFF

JUDITH GODWIN

GLORIA GÓMEZ-SÁNCHEZ

ELSA GRAMCKO

SARAH GRILO

GRACE HARTIGAN

LILIAN HOLT

BUFFIE JOHNSON

YUKI KATSURA

HELEN KHAL

ELAINE DE KOONING

LEE KRASNER

BICE LAZZARI

LIFANG

BERTINA LOPES

MARGARET MELLIS

MARTA MINUJÍN

JOAN MITCHELL

AIKO MIYAWAKI

YOLANDA MOHALYI

NASREEN MOHAMEDI

EMIKO NAKANO

LEA NIKEL

TOMIE OHTAKE

FAYGA OSTROWER

MERCEDES PARDO

CHARLOTTE PARK

BETTY PARSONS

PAT PASSLOF

ALICE RAHON

CAROL RAMA

MARIE RAYMOND

JUDIT REIGL

DEBORAH REMINGTON

BRITTA RINGVALL

ERNA ROSENSTEIN

BEHJAT SADR

NADIA SAIKALI

ZILIA SÁNCHEZ

FANNY SANÍN

MIRIAM SCHAPIRO

SARAH SCHUMANN

ETHEL SCHWABACHER

SONJA SEKULA

TOKO SHINODA

SYLVIA SNOWDEN

JANET SOBEL

VIVIAN SPRINGFORD

FRANCISZKA THEMERSON

ALMATHOMAS

YVONNE THOMAS

HEDWIG THUN

NÍNA TRY GGVADÓTTIR

ELSA VAUDREY

MARIA HELENA VIEIRA DA SILVA

MICHAEL WEST

Helen Frankenthaler

(1928, USA - 2011, USA)

April Mood, 1974

Acrylic on canvas

A major figure of American abstraction,

Frankenthaler is known for her invention of the soak-stain technique in New York in the 1950s.

Often working on the floor, she applied thinned-down paint onto unprimed canvas so diluted it looked like watercolour. She described this body of work as 'drawing with colour' and made increasingly monumental paintings leading to the Colour Field movement which she pioneered.

Sandra Blow

(1925, UK - 2006, UK)

Painting (57), 1957

Oil on canvas

One of the pioneers of the British abstract movement, Blow's paintings are characteristically large scale, colourful abstract collages incorporating discarded studio materials such as sawdust, sackcloth and plaster and loose tea. She painted large geometric shapes which emphasised surface textures creating a tactile quality. Blow is credited with introducing a new, expressive informality to abstract painting in Britain through her improvisatory approach to materials, partly shaped by the influence of Italian Arte Informale.

Audrey Flack

(b. 1931, USA, lives and works in USA)

Abstract Force: Homage to Franz Kline, 1951-52

Oil on canvas

Flack was still a student at art school Cooper

Union in New York when she became a regular member of the influential artist group 8th Street

Club and the legendary artists' haunt Cedar Tavern. It was through Abstract Expressionism that she forged her artistic identity and created highly original works that were structurally ordered yet gestural and fluid, capturing the core sensibility of the age often naming paintings after artists she admired. Later in her career, she became a pioneer of photorealism.

Marta Minujin

(b. 1943, Argentina,

lives and works in Argentina)

Untitled, 1961

Sand, pyroxylin shellac, chalk and carpenter's glue on hardboard

An Argentinian artist known as a pioneer of happenings, performance art, soft sculpture and video, Minujin often uses urban debris and found objects, such as cardboard, fabric and food in work that is both monumental and fragile.

Her work is indebted to a specific lineage of Argentinean protest against the dictatorship. In her long artistic career, she was associated with Art Informel, participatory art, and Pop Art in both Europe and Argentina.

Zilia Sánchez

(b. 1926, Cuba, lives and works in Puerto Rico)

Gravitación, 1963

Oil, cardboard, sawdust and resin on canvas

Sanchez began her career as a set designer and abstract painter for radical theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban Revolution. In the 1950s and early 1960s she travelled to Madrid several times, and there developed a style akin to Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. She move to New York in 1962 and soon began working on her signature stretched canvases with

protruding, curvy elements that recall female body parts, using undulating silhouettes, muted colour palettes and a sensual vocabulary.

Gloria Gómez-Sánchez

(1921, Peru - 2007, Peru)

Untitled, c. 1960

Mixed media

Gómez-Sánchez's artistic career was short, spanning only ten years between 1960 and 1970.

During this time, she had five solo exhibitions in Lima, participated in fifteen group exhibitions in Peru and abroad, and pushed the boundaries of art making, including introducing waste and consumable materials into her painting.

Her last solo exhibition revealed her shift to conceptualism and - ultimately - her rejection of professional art circuits. Few works by her have survived, as she destroyed many of her paintings and assemblages.

Bice Lazzari

(1900, Italy - 1981, Italy)

Senza Titolo [Untitled], 1964

Pencil and watercolour on paper

Lazzari studied decorative arts at the Venice School of Fine Arts and followed a career in applied arts, a field that allowed her some freedom and independence as a woman.

Lazzari had little exposure to international currents of abstraction and it was through her research into design and decoration that she developed her approach to abstraction. By the late 1950s, she became associated with Italian Informalism and devoted herself to painting, oscillating between oil, acrylic and drawing in her signature abstract style.

Wook-kyung Choi

(1940, Korea - 1985, South Korea)

Untitled, 1960s

Acrylic on canvas

A Korean artist who moved to the US in the early 1960s, Wook-kyung Choi had a short yet prolific career before her tragic death at the age of forty-five. Influenced by Korean Art Informel as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in the US, her paintings combine the use of bold colour, an interplay of organic and linear shapes and line and mass through rapid and seemingly chaotic brushwork, alongside passages of more controlled application.

Fanny Sanin

(b. 1938, Colombia, lives and works in USA)

Oil No. 4, 1968

Oil on canvas

After studying art in Bogota, Sanin went on to graduate studies in the US and Mexico. In Mexico she befriended the Rupture Generation, who were exploring lyrical abstraction in tune with gestural expressions evolving in Paris and New York. She spent 1966-68 in London, where she was exposed to the European avant-garde and experimented with gestural abstraction.

She settled permanently in New York in 1971 and dedicated the last five decades to painting meticulous, colourful geometric abstract compositions

Yuki Katsura

(1913, Japan - 1991, Japan)

Untitled, c. 1960

Acrylic on canvas

Initially trained in both Nihonga (Japanese style painting) and Western painting, Katsura visited Paris, Central Africa, and New York in the late 1950s, where she produced a series of unique two-dimensional works, which involved painting over pieces of wrinkled washi paper that had been collaged onto the canvas. After three years in New York, she returned to Japan in 1961 and continued to experiment with unconventional modes of expression including finely detailed paintings, collages and caricatures.

Aiko Miyawaki

(1929, Japan - 2014, Japan)

Work, 1962

Marble powder and oil on canvas

Known for her richly layered paintings and metal sculptures, Miyawaki graduated from the Japan Women's University in 1952 and lived in Europe and North America from 1957-66. She experimented with heavily built-up surfaces made from layers of pigment mixed with marble powder over canvas on board, creating mixed-media works with undulating dune-like surfaces incorporating materials like glass. In 1966 she shifted towards sculpture, with her famous Utsurohi [transience] series of swirling ductile stainless steel cords.

Tomie Ohtake

(1913, Japan - 2015, Brazil)

Roxo (Purple), 1966

Oil on canvas

In 1936 Ohtake travelled to Brazil to visit her brother and unable to return to Japan when the Pacific War broke out, she made a new life for herself in Brazil. Known for her paintings, prints and sculptures, Ohtake did not begin to paint until the age of 39, with the encouragement of the Japanese artist Keiya Sugano. Consistently experimenting with form and process, Ohtake soon ventured from figurative painting into creating abstract shapes and colour fields.

Dusti Bongé

(1903, USA - 1993, USA)

The Beckon, 1956

Oil on Masonite

American artist Bongé is considered Mississippi's first Abstract Expressionist painter. Her early work depicted scenes of Biloxi, Mississippi as well as a variety of self-portraits and still lifes that became more and more abstract over the 1950s as she moved fully into Abstract Expressionism. She continually experimented with different expressive techniques and explored various gestural approaches alternating palettes and compositional layouts. Bonge forged a long relationship with Betty Parsons, the Abstract Expressionist artist and dealer, whose gallery represented her for many years.

Yolanda Mohalyi

(1909, Romania - 1978, Brazil)

Travel, 1967

Oil on canvas

A key figure in post-war Brazilian art, Mohalyi studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest and emigrated in 1931 to Brazil. In the 1950s, after a trip to Europe, she moved away from figuration towards an expressive informalist style, adding textures of sand, sawdust and collage to her works. She participated in the early influential iterations of the São Paulo Biennial during the 1960s and

'70s, which foregrounded Brazil as a centre of the new international art world.

Helen Frankenthaler

After Rubens, 1961

Oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas

Ruth Armer

(1896, USA - 1977, USA)

Untitled, c.1955-60

Oil on canvas

A pioneer of non -objective painting in California, Armer's atmospheric, process-oriented work included a series of synaesthetic early abstractions that associated the emotional and aural characteristics elicited from sound into colour and line. Her works were widely exhibited in the US during her artistically active years, including in three solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art and in the group exhibition 'American Painting Today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1950.

Helen Frankenthaler

Vessel, 1961

Oil on unsized, unprimed canvas

Sylvia Snowden

(1942, USA, lives and works in USA)

Untitled, 1966

Acrylic and oil pastel on Masonite

An African American abstract painter, Snowden has developed a singular body of work which is characterised by a visceral and sculptural application of paint and densely worked underlayers. Often working in series, Snowden's expressive paintings convey an emotional force and tactile quality as she explores the struggles and triumphs of communities around her. In 2018, her work was featured in the landmark exhibition 'Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960-Today' at the National Museum for Women in the Arts.

Gillian Ayres

Distillation, 1957

Oil and house paint on board

Sun Up, 1960

Oil on canvas

Gillian Ayres

(1930, UK - 2018, UK)

Break-off, 1961

Oil on canvas

London-born Ayres studied at Camberwell

School of Art from 1946-50, and exhibited with the Young Contemporaries in 1949, aged just

19. One of the leading exponents of the radical developments in abstract painting dominating

British art in the 1950s and '60s, Ayres' heavily worked canvases reflected how she claimed to see the world: in ebullient shapes and colours. She was included in the Whitechapel Art Gallery's ground-breaking 1963 exhibition

'British Painting in the 60s'.

ACTION, GESTURE, PAINT:

WOMEN ARTISTS AND

GLOBAL ABSTRACTION 1940-70

This exhibition celebrates the women artists of mid-20th-century gestural abstraction and shows how they shaped modern painting. The story of abstract art took a radical turn in the 1940s.

Fusing bodily, gestural and emotive expression with colour, mark-making and the materiality of paint, this new movement was termed - in the USA - Abstract Expressionism. It is often thought to have been centred in New York, where it was defined mainly by the work of white male artists.

However, this new style of painting was a global phenomenon, shaped as much by local cultural and political contexts as by international exchange and dialogue. This was a period of great historical shifts: the aftermath of the Second World War, global industrialisation, the rise of civil rights and post-colonial movements, and a 'cold war' - marked by the threat of nuclear extinction.

Lee Krasner

(1908, USA - 1984, USA)

Bald Eagle, 1955

Oil, paper and canvas collage on linen

One of the defining figures of the first generations of Abstract Expressionists in New York, Krasner had her first solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951 and was included in the seminal 9th Street Art Exhibition the same year. With husband Jackson Pollock, she moved to East Hampton, where she made her series of Little Images and collage paintings which included fragments of discarded paintings by both Pollock and Krasner which she let fall onto the sufarce of the canvas.

After Pollock's death in 1956, Krasner took over his barn studio as her work grew in scale and ambition.

Charlotte Park

(1918, USA - 2010, USA)

Jubilee, 1955

Oil on canvas

Park and her husband painter James Brooks arrived in New York in 1945, moving into the former studio of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. They visited Krasner and Pollock regularly in Springs in East Hampton and eventually moved there themselves. Park, whose abstract paintings utilised bold colours and rhythmic lines and later collage elements, was recognised in her time, and showed in numerous group exhibitions at the renowned Stable Gallery.

Ethel Schwabacher

(1903, USA - 1984, USA)

Woman: Red Sea, Dead Sea, 1951

Oil on canvas

After initially studying sculpture, Schwabacher turned to painting, taking art classes at the Arts Students League in New York. She travelled in Europe and later studied with Arshile Gorky, a recent émigré to New York whose influence, along with Surrealism, psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious, informed her highly charged atmospheric paintings of nature and female figures in bold colours inspired by classical mythology and experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Schwabacher had her first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1953.

Grace Hartigan

(1922, USA - 2008, USA)

Cedar Bar [originally Aries], 1951

Oil on canvas

Hartigan was part of the dynamic group known as the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, which also included her friends Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell and with them was included in important gallery shows of the time. In the 1950s she used the name George, which she attributed to her admiration for nineteenth-century women writers George Eliot and George Sand. She collaborated with poets Barbara Guest and Frank O'Hara and included recognisable elements from everyday life in her

'all-over' compositions.

Helen Frankenthaler

Circus Landscape, 1951

Oil and charcoal on sized, primed canvas

Franciszka Themerson

(1907, Poland - 1988, UK)

Calligramme I (Q), 1960

Red emulsion and black enamel on paper

Themerson was a Polish avant-garde artist who came to London, with the Polish government-in-exile in 1940, where she spent the rest of her life. Primarily a painter, she also worked in illustration, theatre design, graphic design and avant-garde films with her husband Stefan Themerson. She created what she described as

'Bi-abstract pictures' using plaster and cloth in relief works and poured enamel paint onto paper in improvised drawings relying on chance.

MYTH

SYMBOL

RITUAL

The paintings in this section are characterised by systems of marks or forms that suggest a non-representational language - abstract signs and symbols that exist outside of place and time.

Their origins lie in the legacies of European and Latin American movements such as Surrealism, Taschisme and Art Informel. Spontaneous or automatic writing' was seen as a way of bypassing rationalism to access unconscious drives and desires. The artists here were also interested in non -western systems of belief and their expression through calligraphy and graffiti, as well as in the symbols and glyphs associated with ancient myths and rituals.

Buffie Johnson

(1912, USA - 2006, USA)

Pentecost, 1958

Oil on canvas

Johnson travelled to Paris in the 1930s, where she met the artistic avant-garde and absorbed both Cubism and Surrealism. She returned to New York as war broke out in Europe and in 1947 she moved to East Hampton, joining a small community of artists centred around Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock and Elaine and Willem de Kooning. Her work, largely celebrating female energy and life force, was first shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950.

She also published a major study on prehistoric representations of The Great Goddess which informed her work.

Betty Parsons

(1900, USA - 1982, USA)

Looking Out, 1957

Oil on canvas

Parsons was a painter and sculptor, and owner of the eponymous Betty Parsons Gallery in New York from 1946 to 1982, which exhibited and supported many Abstract Expressionist artists and helped shape twentieth-century art in the US. From 1923-33, she studied painting and sculpture in Paris. Returning to New York, she painted landscapes and still lifes but turned to abstraction in the late 1940s. Often referencing natural elements, her paintings feature biomorphic forms levitating on muted colour fields.

Behiat Sadr

(1924, Iran - 2009, France)

Untitled, 1956

Oil on wood

A pioneering figure in the visual arts in Iran, Sadr studied at the Fine Arts facult of Tehran University and in 1955 travelled to study in Rome, where she encountered Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. There, Sad developed a style of rhythmic brushstrokes in all-over compositions of curvilinear flowing forms based on nature. In the late 1960s she became interested in optical experimentation and kinetic art, moving into installation, including a well-known series of painted functional

Venetian blinds

Judit Reigl

(1923, Hungary - 2020, France)

Mass Writing, 1961

Oil paint on canvas

Reigl studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1942-45. In 1947, she was awarded a scholarship that enabled her to continue her studies in Rome before relocating to Paris in 1950. There, she encountered Surrealist artist André Breton and was influenced by Surrealist ideas, particularly the technique of automatic writing that remained substantial throughout her career. Later, she moved towards lyrical abstraction, in work that emphasised the gestural involvement of the body when painting.

Jay DeFeo

(1929, USA - 1989, USA)

Torso, 1952

Oil with string on canvas

After travelling in Europe and North Africa in her youth, DeFeo returned to her native California, joining the San Francisco community of Beat artists, poets and jazz musicians. Her work from this time was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and combined geometric forms found in Italian architecture and Asian, African and prehistoric art. She often included diverse materials like rags, string and plaster to explore the broadest definitions of sculpture, drawing, collage and painting.

Sarah Grilo

(1919, Argentina - 2007, Spain)

Black Wall, 1967

Oil on canvas

Grilo was a member of the Grupo de Artistas Modernos [Group of Modern Artists] who explored geometric abstraction in 1950s Buenos

Aires. After the group dissolved she travelled to Europe, then moved to New York in 1962, where she developed a more gestural and lyrical informal abstraction using letters, numbers and symbols drawn from torn posters, signs and graffitied walls she observed on the streets of the city. She returned to Europe in the 1970s, living and working in Paris and Madrid.

Maliheh Afnan

(1935, Palestine - 2016, UK)

Concours, 1961

Oil on canvas

Afnan was part of an important generation of female artists and writers who emerged in the Middle East in the new cultural climate of the 1960s. Her work touches on the post-war themes of exile and memory, based on her and her family's experience being exiled from Palestine in 1948. Interested in Arabic and Persian scripts, she transformed these in her 'written paintings' into abstract forms, creating a visual calligraphic language concerned with memory and feelings

or loss and displacement.

Vivian Springford

(1913, USA - 2003, USA)

Untitled, 1961

Acrylic on canvas

Springford studied at the Arts Students League in New York and worked as a commercial illustrator in the 1930s and 1940s. Her work became more abstract in the 1950s, influenced by East Asian philosophy and Chinese calligraphy, and she associated with many of the Abstract Expressionists in New York at the time. Her artistic language developed into what became known as Colour Field painting, as she explored staining and dripping techniques in 'chromatic pools' of acrylic washes and centrifugal stains.

Alice Rahon

(1904, France - 1987, Mexico)

Sans Titre [Untitled], c. 1930s

Oil on canvas

A French painter and poet, Rahon began her artistic career creating hats for fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris, where she also became close to many Surrealist artists. She settled in Mexico City in the late 1930s, where she began painting, with a particular interest in prehistoric imagery, Surrealism and Indigenous art. Rahon often scratched through the surface of her paintings to reveal the underlying colours and included found objects (feathers, leaves, butterfly wings) in her works.

Etel Adnan

(1925, Lebanon - 2021, France)

Untitled, 1960

Ink wash and pastel on paper

Having studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, Adan moved between San Francisco, Paris and Beirut as a univeristy lecturer, journalist and poet. Untrained as a visual artist her small-format colourful abstractions connect nature, politics, poetry and myth and explore the relationship between visual language and literary expression which she described as: 'It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am!

Margaret Mellis

(1914, China - 2009, UK)

Plant (Black, Umber, Orange), 1960

Oil on board

Scottish painter Mellis taught at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1935-37 before relocating to Cornwall, becoming one of the early members and last survivors of the group of modernist artists who gathered in St Ives in the 1940s. Mellis was renowned throughout her career as a colourist, and her works from the mid-1950s moved away from direct representation, simplifying still life and landscapes to flattened areas of pure, gestural colour.

Bertina Lopes

(1924, Mozambique - 2012, Italy)

Segni di terra [Earth signs], 1969

Watercolour on paper

A Mozambican painter, sculptor and activist,

Lopes studied in Lisbon where she encountered the avant-garde painting of Portuguese modernism and contemporary artistic international move-ments. After returning to Mozambique in 1953, she became an influential professor and engaged with the anti-colonial and independence movements but was forced to leave Mozambique in 1961 by the military dictatorship. She settled in Rome, focusing on a body of work based on abstracted forms inspired by African iconography and informed by political events.

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