Expanding Minimalism Through The Female Avant-Garde

9 July 2018

Ely House, London

37 Dover Street, W1S 4NJ
6.30pm

Chaired by CATHERINE PETITGAS, Chair of the Tate International Committee, collector, patron and art historian in conversation with ANKE KEMPKES, the exhibition's curator, renowned expert on female avant-garde artists EWA OPALKA, Polish critic and curator with focus in feminist visual art theory SARAH WILSON Professor, Courtauld Institute of Art

‘For a long time we accepted a history that was one-sided. Now we see that it was a very incomplete picture. It is important now to close the gaps and to bring back the contribution of women artists to the history of the neo-avant-garde.’ Anke Kempkes

Join us at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London for an after-hours gallery opening of Land of Lads, Land of Lashes featuring the ground-breaking work of three pioneering avant-garde artists of the 1960s and 70s Rosemarie Castoro, Wanda Czelkowska and Lydia Okumura.

Our esteemed guest speakers will discuss how the context of today's shifting political and cultural landscape has now enabled these artists to receive widespread critical acclaim and increasing recognition. The talk will explore the connections between these pioneering female artists and their practice across the three distinct cultural geographies of New York, São Paulo and Warsaw, and how each artist has succeeded in expanding the boundaries - and our understanding - of classical minimalism.

Modern sculpture’s use of industrial materials evokes a decidedly romantic notion of masculine middle class labor, one that artists like Jackson Pollock and Carl Andre used to posit themselves as the artistic “everyman.” This is why, perhaps more so than any other artistic medium, sculpture is wrought with gendered nuances and contradictions.
Scotti Hill on Lydia Okumura, 2017