Let’s Talk About Women in the Art World
Throughout the centuries, women have been involved in making inspiring art, whether as creators and innovators of new forms of artistic expression, patrons, collectors, sources of inspiration, or significant contributors as art historians and critics.
It’s no secret that the extraordinarily competitive contemporary art world can be an especially tough place for female artists to navigate and succeed.
Artland presents you 10 inspiring women of the art world of our times – gallerists and artists – who are standing out and are worthy to have a closer look at.
Gallerists
Ellen de Bruijne Projects
It’s a contemporary art gallery and project space situated at the edge of the Jordaan. Since its first show in October ’99, the gallery has focused on new tendencies in contemporary art, concentrating on performative art, socially related art, installations and works in progress. The aim of the gallery is to look for future tendencies by putting the new in comparison with the recent past and experimenting to develop new standards.
Tatjana Pieters
Devoted to exhibition making and the importance of contemporary art within a social framework, she chose to open a museum space in the peripheral context of Ghent. Tatjana Pieters has four interchanging missions: To offer a platform to and guide artists at an early stage of their career and function as a ‘catalyst’ both on an intellectual and strategic level.
Mini Galerie
Dedicated to exhibiting inspiring art from emerging contemporary artists, Mini Galerie is not bound by convention or definitions. The objective of the gallery is to challenge the perceptions of art rooted in street culture and push it into new mediums and territories.
The RYDER projects
The RYDER projects is a gallery for contemporary art in East London presenting the work of emerging and mid-career artists in curated dialogues and solo presentations. Concealed behind an industrial shutter, the space aims to provide a platform to support emerging and established artists from around the world. The RYDER projects bets on diversity, supporting the multiplicity that comes from an increasingly globalised society.
QB Gallery
Since 2014, QB Gallery in Oslo, Norway, has been committed to making contemporary art accessible to a broader audience, not least new upcoming collectors. As a project-based showroom for contemporary art and cultural production, QB works across the art field with artists ranging from the young to the well-established, producing original works as well as limited-edition prints and other media. The gallery’s aim is to foster and nurture younger Norwegian contemporary artists, thus enabling a new generation to enjoy and collect inspiring art.
Artists
Ann Cathrin November Høibo
Ann Cathrin November Høibo was born in Norway where she lives and works in Oslo and Kristiansand. She has made studies at the Department Art Academy and at the Department of Textile in Oslo and the combination of these 2 aspects is a strong part of her inspiring art.
Ella Kruglyanskaya
Born in Latvia, but lives and works in New York. Ella paints large-scale, cartoonish vignettes featuring exuberant, full-figured women and their fashion accessories. Characterized by splashy colors and patterns, her paintings depict women in revealing clothes, engaged in leisure activities or absurdist scenarios. “I’m interested in pictorial events that are not narrative but visual and sometimes aspire to an unspoken punch line,” she has said. “The figure functions as the vessel and the space onto which the events of the painting occur.”
Genieve Figgis
Genieve Figgis is Irish and working in oil and acrylic produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history. In her compositions, however, all is not well. Her figures appear either faceless or as foolishly grinning, ghoul-like creatures, whose loosely rendered forms seem vulnerable and insubstantial as they merge with their lushly painted, semi-abstract surroundings.
Tschabalala Self
Born and based in New York, Tschabalala Self builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black female body. The artist constructs exaggerated depictions of female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions.” Self has said: “I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.”
Joyce Pensato
An American, born in Brooklyn, Joyce Pensato is best known for her charcoal drawings and wall paintings of cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Felix the Cat, and Homer Simpson. Starting from drawings of the characters’ basic forms, Pensato grinds, slashes, and sands her surfaces to create altered, mutilated versions given names such as Abominable Snow Mickey or The Donald.