This Summer, I have exhibited my work three times. Al, my partner helped me to hang the work. Each time someone came up and, turning to Al asked whether the work was his even though I was standing by his side. I thought we had been transported back ito the 19th, or even the 18th century. To me, the work is the important thing, not whether it has been made by a male or female. Anyway, it got me thinking about female artists past and present.
Here are two:
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842)
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, 1755–1842) is one of the finest 18th-century French painters and among the most important of all women artists. An autodidact with exceptional skills as a portraitist,
she achieved success in France and Europe during one of the most eventful, turbulent periods in European history.
In 1776, she married the leading art dealer in Paris; his profession at first kept her from being accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Nevertheless, through the
intervention of Marie Antoinette, she was admitted at the age of 28 in 1783, becoming one of only four women members.
Obliged to flee France in 1789 because of her association with the queen, she traveled to Italy, where in 1790 she was elected to membership in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. Independently, she worked in Florence, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin before returning to France, taking sittings from, among others, members of the royal families of Naples, Russia, and Prussia. While in exile, she exhibited at the Paris Salons.
She was remarkable not only for her technical gifts but for her understanding of and sympathy with her sitters.
(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2016)
#VigeeLeBrun (follow this and watch an amusing video about one of the restrictions faced by Le Brun and other 18th century portraitists.)
Mona Hartoum ( b. 1952 )
Hatoum challenges the movements of surrealism and minimalism, making work which explores the conflicts and contradictions of our world. Her studies at the Slade School of Art coincided with developing ideas around gender and race, and she began to explore the relationship between politics and the individual through performance.
In the late 1980s she began to make installations and sculptures in a wide range of materials. These often use the grid or geometric forms to reference to systems of control within society. She has made a number of works using household objects which are scaled up or changed to make them familiar but uncanny. (Text taken from Tate gallery London. 'Who is Mona Hartoum?' 2016)
Hotspot 2013
The title Hot Spot 2013 refers to the term ‘hot spot’ meaning a place of military or civil unrest. Using delicate red neon to outline the contours of the continents, this sculpture presents the entire globe as a danger zone – what Hatoum describes as a ‘world continually caught up in conflict and unrest’.
WHAT IS HER CULTURAL BACKGROUND?
"Although I was born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority of
Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they were never able
to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was one way of discouraging
them from integrating into the Lebanese situation.
When I went to London in 1975 for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that created a kind of dislocation, [which] manifests itself in my work…"
(BOMB Magazine with Janine Antoni, 1998
conflict and unrest’.)
HATOUM IN QUOTES…
"Often the work is about conflict and contradiction – and that
conflict or contradiction can be within the actual object"
(TateShots, 2011)
"I’ve always had quite a rebellious and contrary attitude.
The more I feel I am being pushed into a mold, the more
I feel like going in the opposite direction."
(BOMB Magazine with Janine Antoni, 1998)
"My favourite way of working is to go and spend time in
the place I am exhibiting in and make work locally.
I feel much more inspired when I… can work with people
and materials that I find in that location."
(Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2015)
(Tate Gallery London 2016)
Although centuries divide these two artists, I appreciate
their work, not only for the quality of the work but also
for the confidence they have demonstrated through their work.
Whilst Vigée Le Brun's work is limited in subject matter,
(unlike some of her male counterparts), Hatoum's work is
interactive, engaged with the ebb and flow of world events.
"The power of Hatoum’s work is her ability to transcend local
and personal issues and make them universal and it’s why she
remains one of the most important artists in her generation."
(Rebecca Fulleylove, It’s Nice That, 2016)