Women in Abstraction

Luxury fashion online retailer Mytheresa is honoured to be a sponsor of the “Women in Abstraction” exhibition, to support and give recognition to female artists around the globe.

The “Women in Abstraction” exhibition, which should be presented at the Centre Pompidou from May 19th to August 23th 2021, offers a new take on the history of abstraction- from its origins to the 1980s- and brings together the specific contributions of around one hundred and ten “women artists”.

Luxury fashion online retailer Mytheresa is honoured to be a sponsor of the “Women in Abstraction” exhibition, to support and give recognition to female artists around the globe.

The “Women in Abstraction” exhibition, which will be presented at the Centre Pompidou from May 19th to August 23th 2021, offers a new take on the history of abstraction- from its origins to the 1980s- and brings together the specific contributions of around one hundred and ten “women artists”.

Christine Macel, Chief Curator, and Karolina Lewandowska, Curator for Photography, revisit this history, and highlight the processes that made these “women artists” invisible through a chronological survey combining fine arts, dance, photography, film and decorative arts. Echoing the French exhibition title (“Elles font l’abstraction”, i.e., “They/She make(s) abstraction”), the artists are presented as full-edged actors and co- reators of modernism and its a aftermath in their own right.

“Women in abstraction is an exhibition that aims to show how female artists have been major actors and co-creators of modernity and its a aftermath, how much they have contributed to the multidisciplinarity of abstraction and thus break the cloak of invisibility that still covers many of their key contributions ”, commented Christine Macel, Chief Curator.

The exhibition shows the decisive turning points that marked the history of Abstraction and questions its aesthetic canons without redefining a new one. It also goes beyond the idea of a history of art conceived as a succession of purely pioneering practices. By giving “women artists” a new place in this history, the exhibition demonstrates its complexity and diversity.

First of all, it makes an unprecedented foray into the 19th century with the rediscovery of Georgiana Hough- ton’s work from the 1860s, undermining the chronological origins of abstraction by tracing it back to its spiritualist roots. It then shines a spotlight on key figures through mini monographs highlighting artists who have been little shown in Europe or unfairly eclipsed. It focuses particularly on the specific educational, social and institutional contexts that surrounded and encouraged or, conversely, hindered the recognition of “women artists”. The exhibition reveals why many “women artists” did not necessarily seek recognition. It considers the positions of the artists themselves, with all their complexities and paradoxes. Some, like Sonia Delaunay-Terk, adopted a non-gendered position while others, like Judy Chicago, laid claim to a feminine art.

This female version of history challenges the limitation of the study of abstraction to painting alone, which is one of the reasons why many women have been excluded, as the specific modernist approach rejected the spiritualist, ornamental and performative dimensions of abstraction. The perspective is also a global one that includes the modernities of Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, not to men on the African-American artists whose multiple voices only benefited from certain visibility from the early 1970s onwards to tell their story with sever-al voices and reach beyond the Western canon. The scenography includes documentary spaces devoted to founding exhibitions, key women actors of abstraction and celebrated critics, particularly within the feminist struggles of the 1970s and their postmodern interpretation.