Women Abstract painters Part 2

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Chinyee

(b. 1929, China, lives and works in USA)

Solids, 1964

Oil on canvas

Chinese-American Chinyee left Nanjing in 1974 to study in New York, where she received her BFA from the College of Mount Saint Vincent and MA from New York University. The explosion in abstraction around her offered a way of bridging the Eastern traditions of brush and ink calligraphy and watercolours, with a new form of self-expression. Although her early abstract works reveal traces of figuration, she gradually adopted a looser brushwork that draws on both calligraphic traditions and Western abstraction.

Helen Khal

(1923, USA - 2009, Lebanon)

Untitled (Ochre over Brown), 1968

Oil on canvas

Khal grew up in Pennsylvania and in 1946 travelled to Lebanon to study painting at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut. She met her future husband poet Yusuf al-Khal and in 1963 they established Lebanon's first permanent art gallery. Her paintings contain fluid blocks of colour in intimately scaled abstract works infused with light which she described as a way to create 'an oasis for the emotions'. In 1975, she published the influential feminist book, The Woman Artist in Lebanon.

Nadia Saikali

(b. 1936, France, lives and works in France)

Geste [Gesture], 1960

Oil on canvas

Saikali graduated from the Académie

Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in 1956 and then studied at L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière and L'École des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Before moving to Beirut her interest in abstraction grew from a love of geography and geology, ancient civilisations and archaeology, which inform her mark-making and fluid gestures.

She permanently moved to France in 1979 during the civil war in Lebanon

Sonia Sekula

(1918, Switzerland - 1963, Switzerland)

7am, c. 1948-49

Oil on canvas

Sekula was a Swiss artist who emigrated to New York with her family in 1936, where she quickly became part of the artistic avant-garde surrounding Surrealist émigrés André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Inspired by Surrealism and Indian folklore, she developed a style focusing on abstract patterns and lines. During her time in New York she exhibited in numerous exhibitions alongside Abstract Expressionists, but her work was rarely shown in Europe until the 1990s, when she began to find recognition.

Fayga Ostrower

(1920, Poland - 2001, Brazil)

Composition, 1958

Etching and aquatint

Ostrower's Polish family moved to Germany and then in 1934 were forced to leave to flee the persecution of the Jewish people. They emigrated to Brazil, where she studied and developed a passion and skill for woodblock and metal engraving. Her early figurative work depicted social themes, however in 1953 she began to focus on abstraction in printmaking inspired by Cubism and Cézanne. Ostrower taught art and published many books reflecting on the power of art as a universal language.

Asma Fayoumi

(b. 1943, Jordan, lives and works in Syria)

Requiem for a City, 1968

Oil on canvas

Fayoumi was a key figure in the development of 1960s Syrian Abstraction which emerged at a time of social change in the Arab world amidst growing opposition to Western influence and a search for a new artistic identity. She began painting cityscapes, moving away from realism to using more abstract forms and gestural expressionist marks that still hint at architecture. Later works were inspired by Arabic poetry and featured female figures drawn from mythology.

Nasreen Mohamedi

(1937, Pakistan - 1990, India)

Untitled, 1962

Watercolour and ink on paper

Recognised for her significant contribution to Indian modernism, Mohamedi studied at Saint Martin's School of Art in London from

1954-57 and worked in Europe before returning to India in the early 1970s. In the 1960s she developed an abstract language with a fluid gestural use of line and colour, before becoming interested in the modernist grid as a vehicle for exploring utopian landscapes and cities in detailed drawings of geometric lines and forms suspended in space.

Carol Rama

(1918, Italy - 2015, Italy)

Si geme, si fa del Bop [We moan, we do the Bop], 1968

Pigmented glue and dolls' eyes on card

Rama, a self-taught artist, began making erotic watercolours in the mid-1930s, before her work evolved to explore corporeality and viscerality through abstraction. Rama's career spanned several art movements, including Surrealism, post-war abstraction and Arte Povera, and her transgressive drawings, assemblages and paintings often incorporated materials such as dolls' eyes, syringes, wire and fur in her 1960s work and car tires, rubber and electric cables in the 1970s. She returned to figuration in the '80s.

This gallery presents a sequence of more intimate studies and paintings. Although Abstract Expressionist canvases - particularly those created by American artists - were often epic in size, artists working with gestural abstraction also painted on a smaller scale. Some artists used window-scaled canvas as a nod to domestic interiors, or as a way of concentrating the impact of line and pigment. For others this may have been necessitated by a lack of resources or having to balance their work as an artist with responsibilities of family life - making the kitchen table their studio.

Erna Rosenstein

(1913, Ukraine - 2004, Poland)

Composition, undated

Oil on canvas

A leading figure amongst Polish avant-garde artists, Rosenstein studied in Vienna and travelled to Paris before returning to Warsaw in 1934. Interested early on in Surrealism and the unconscious, the abstract paintings of fluid biomorphic forms of the 1950s and 60s manifest states of mind. She remained in Poland after the trauma of the Nazi occupation, her later work oscillated between figuration and abstraction, in defiance of the dictates of Soviet Realism.

Nína Tryggvadóttir

(1913, Iceland - 1968, USA)

Eruption VII, 1959

Oil on linen mounted on panel

One of the few Icelandic women artists of her generation, Tryggvadottir was a painter but also employed collage, stained glass and mosaic, her compositions referencing nature, Icelandic landscapes and Nordic light. Tryggvadóttir moved to New York in 1942 to study at the Art Students League, becoming an important member of the city's Abstract Expressionist scene, even though she spent much of the 1950s away since the US government suspected her of being a communist sympathiser.

Elna Fonnesbech-Sandberg

(1892, Denmark - 1994, Denmark)

Myriader, 1959

Oil on canvas

Fonnesbech-Sandberg was a Danish artist, collector and patron who, during the 1920s, built up a unique art collection of Scandinavian modernism. Following the Second World War, she shifted her focus to collect expressive abstract art. Fonnesbech-Sandberg started painting in 1947 at the request of her psychoanalyst, quickly developing a densely layered, abstract style consisting of numerous layers of paint that she then scratched through and repainted again and again.

Hedwig Thun

(1892, Germany - 1969, Germany)

Dodona, 1962

Oil on canvas

Thun's early works were figurative, and she turned to abstraction while a student at the famous Bauhaus school, where her early compositions show a similarity to her teacher Wassily Kandinsky. From 1950 onwards, Thun's works became more gestural as she experimented with various stain and drip techniques. Her works were exhibited internationally, including at MoMA in New York, but only about eighty of her paintings and some of her writing survive.

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