{"id":401,"date":"2014-06-05T14:10:31","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T14:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/?p=401"},"modified":"2015-03-12T13:32:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T13:32:42","slug":"student-review-underexposed-a-tribute-to-female-artists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/2014\/06\/05\/student-review-underexposed-a-tribute-to-female-artists\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Review: UNDEREXPOSED – A Tribute to Female Artists"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are please to launch a new series of articles written by our History and Philosophy of Art students in response to our current exhibitions. This inaugural entry comes from Nigel Ip<\/strong>, a second-year HPA student, whose particular Art History interests include the Italian Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites and Conceptual Art. You can find more of his writing here: http:\/\/nigelartreviews.wordpress.com\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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UNDEREXPOSED: A Tribute to Female Artists<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Nigel Ip<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the space of ten seconds, how many female artists can you think of?<\/p>\n

Now repeat the same exercise but with male artists\u2026<\/p>\n

Off the top of my head I counted four female artists \u2013 Artemisia Gentileschi, Barbara Hepworth, Marina Abramovi\u0107 and Tracey Emin \u2013 and about seven male artists \u2013 Raphael, Michelangelo, Vel\u00e1zquez, Damien Hirst, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso.<\/p>\n

You can do the same exercise over and over again and still find more male artists than their counterparts.<\/p>\n

Female artists in general have been under-represented throughout art history. Art-making and the training that preceded it was an intensely expensive activity. Those women artists who did succeed were usually from wealthy backgrounds, whether through marriage or inheritance. In other cases, the lack of female artists was largely due to gender biases in society and also the dismissing of their work as \u2018craft\u2019 rather than \u2018fine art\u2019. It is precisely this that UNDEREXPOSED<\/em> takes as its starting point. Through the medium of print, it attempts to elevate and shed light on the work of female artists, past and present.<\/p>\n

The works are almost entirely by artists of the 20th<\/sup> century and the present day given the relatively\u00a0limited availability of older works accessible by curators and University of Kent students Lynne Dickens and Frances Chiverton. However, a wonderful print of a Holy Family<\/em> (c. 1575) by Diana Ghisi did make it into the show under the generosity of Dr Ben Thomas. Ghisi, also known as Diana Scultori, was an Italian Renaissance engraver who is recorded as being the first female artist allowed to sell her own work under her own name. The inclusion of this print stands out as a historically significant statement amongst the rest of the works that women artists did exist and succeed before the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Just around the corner of the same wall are two prints by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, kindly lent from the Victoria & Albert Museum Print Collection. Both artists were deeply involved with the Impressionists during the late 19th<\/sup> century, the former being well acquainted with \u00c9douard Manet, the latter with Edgar Degas. Thematically, their work focuses on the culturally restricted lives of women, evident in Morisot\u2019s choice of domestic settings and Cassatt\u2019s specific interest in mothers and children as subjects. Unlike their male counterparts, these women provide us with a glimpse of women\u2019s private lives from the perspective of one who is also restricted by the same rules as imposed by society. These artists have empathy for their subjects. You can almost feel their unspoken pain in the vacant expression of the fan-holding subject in Cassatt\u2019s Tea<\/em> (1890).<\/p>\n

This exhibition attempts to provide the viewer with a small sample that displays the richness and variety of ideas and techniques exploited by these artists. Towards the latter end of the 20th<\/sup> century we have seen a flourish of successful women artists. Royal Academicians like Anne Desmet \u2013 whose Babel Tower in Pieces<\/em> (1999) is one of three pieces in the exhibition \u2013 are examples of women\u2019s recognition within the art world \u2013 and society \u2013 as artists worthy of praise. Tracey Emin\u2019s appointment in 2011 as one of two Professors of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts since its founding is proof of this. One of her autobiographical prints proudly hangs in the foyer of the School of Arts building beside an edition of the Guerrilla Girls\u2019 Do Women STILL Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?<\/em> (2012).<\/p>\n

Artists exhibited in the show include Kent University alumni Dawn Cole whose solar plate etchings allude to pieces of white lace. Her series Reading Between the Lines<\/em> take passages from a diary written by her great aunt during her time as a WW1 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. The diary records some of the wartime horrors and incidents at the hospital, and passages like \u201cMen had their eyes removed\u201d are interwoven into the lace-like patterns of Cole\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Gwen Raverat proved to be a fast favourite at the private view, while others took interest in Barbara Hepworth\u2019s minimalist lithographs and screenprints. Charlotte Cornish\u2019s vivid abstractions raised a few eyebrows too, and what a pleasure it was to see some of Bridget Riley\u2019s works \u2013 Frieze<\/em> (2000), Two Blues<\/em> (2003), Composition with Circles (no. 5)<\/em> (2005) \u2013 whose conceptions are always made with the medium in mind, taking into account their size and effect on the viewer.<\/p>\n

However, big names like Sarah Lucas weren\u2019t necessarily the most popular as evidenced by Lucy Farley\u2019s silkscreen print To the Lighthouse, Ile de Re<\/em> (2013) \u2013 directly opposite the former\u2019s Squab Squaw<\/em> (2011) and Sarah Hardacre\u2019s openly controversial screenprints of women in urban settings \u2013 generating much discussion among visitors to the exhibition. Farley studied BA Fine Art in 2001 at Central St. Martins and specialised in printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2007. She is currently undergoing a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Arts and she has exhibited in several small-scale group shows over the years. The subject of her work is usually urban and rural locations with a great degree of expressiveness, bold use of black lines and atmospheric choice of colours, contrasting very well with the almost photographic quality of Alison Wilding\u2019s lithographs of Starlings<\/em> (2005).<\/p>\n

For figurative art there is a concentrated display of prints by Eileen Cooper, Anita Klein and Ana Maria Pacheco. These prints have a particular focus on women with the first two often incorporating the same figure in a large body of work. Cooper\u2019s linocuts tend to be psychological at first glance \u2013 some might say surreal, others even Freudian. Their content is a mix between fantasy and reality with titles like The Moon, The Bird and The Bride<\/em> (1992) and Walking on Air<\/em> (2005). Her recurring figure is a naked woman. Klein, on the other hand, uses a clothed figure. Her themes often revolve around the idea of beauty in art and everyday life such as nature, romance, family and birds. The prints displayed in the exhibition \u2013 The Goddess of the Pear Tree<\/em> (2013) and The Spider<\/em> (2013) \u2013 are part of the former category. In an interview in 2011, Klein said that she \u201cgrew up with a very strong sense of possibility of everything being taken away\u2026I know that what I would miss are the very small things like having breakfast with my family, cleaning our teeth together\u2026 not holidays or birthdays or the photo-album version of life. Not the things we record but things that go past, slip through our fingers, things we don\u2019t manage to enjoy\u201d. It is in the ordinary in which we find the most happiness and create the most memories.<\/p>\n

This exhibition has a certain lightness to it, perhaps due to the variety of its displays. A range of techniques and media are explored here \u2013 woodcuts, linocuts, screenprinting, photo-etching, engraving \u2013 and the content is just as diverse \u2013 people, houses, sea, sky, nature, society, abstract forms \u2013 and it keeps on going. Not only does this show women\u2019s freedom in exploiting the possibilities of art-making but also the analogous diversity in printmaking itself when compared to painting or sculpture. From a method used to allow artists to advertise and promote their art, as cheap reproductions of paintings \u2013 or labour-intensive equivalents to present-day postcards \u2013 to the idea of prints as a medium and original work of art in its own right. The exhibition is a celebration of women\u2019s recognition in the art world and printmaking\u2019s infinite possibilities; two understated aspects of society combined to create something beautiful and perhaps even moving.<\/p>\n

UNDEREXPOSED: Female artists and the medium of print<\/em> runs until 19th<\/sup> June 2014 at Studio 3 Gallery, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent.\u00a0http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/past-exhibitions\/underexposed\/<\/p>\n

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We are please to launch a new series of articles written by our History and Philosophy of Art students in response to our current exhibitions. This inaugural entry comes from Nigel Ip, a second-year HPA student, whose particular Art History interests include the Italian Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites and Conceptual Art. You can find more of … Continue reading Student Review: UNDEREXPOSED – A Tribute to Female Artists<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65798,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1075,36691],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65798"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/studio3gallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}