Visiting Whitechapel Art Gallery, London - Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists, Global Abstraction

If you like this video please Buy Me A Coffee - - so we can continue to make more content reviewing art exhibitions and interviewing artists. Each coffee bought is hugely appreciated as together we can build a channel with wonderful films about art. Founder Robert Dunt reviews the London art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940 - 70. This amazing exhibition showcases many women artist who are not so well known as well as showing superb pieces by artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, who was Jackson Pollock’s Wife and Joan Mitchell. It’s a great show that is full of oil paint! The press release says - Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 9 February - 7 May 2023 Galleries 1,8 & 9 Ticketed A major new exhibition brings together for the first time over 150 paintings by an overlooked generation of 80 international women artists. Whitechapel Gallery presents Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70. The exhibition reaches beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionism movement, to discover the practices of numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War. The exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that, while the Abstract Expressionism movement is said to have begun in the USA, artists all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture in the mid-century period, from Art Informel to Arte Povera in Europe, and from calligraphic abstraction in East Asia to experimental, highly political practices in Central and South America, and the Middle East. The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner (b. 1908, USA-d. 1984, USA) and Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928, , USA), alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes (b. 1924, Mozambique-d. 2012, Italy) and Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi (b. 1940, Korea-d. 1985, South Korea). More than half of the works have never before been on public display in the UK. At a time when the world was processing the anxieties of the Second World War and navigating a backdrop of deeply conflicted political climates, artists from across the world began to express their concerns in a new art that embraced personal and political freedom. The exhibition is arranged thematically, opening with Helen Frankenthaler’s four-metre-long abstract painting April Mood (1974). The opening section examines how artists were exploring the variable physical characteristics of paint, abandoning many of the accepted conventions around structure and composition. Accompanying Frankenthaler in this grouping is an untitled work from the 1960s evoking dissonance and tactility by Wook-kyung Choi, whose work has never before been shown in the UK, where white and blue stripes stage the spontaneous play of acrylic smatterings in green, yellow and red. Gestural abstraction was also beginning to emerge in South American countries as an anti-establishment vehicle of defiance in the face of prevailing social and political realities, and as a signpost of change. On display are two untitled works from 1961 by Argentinian artist Marta Minujin (b. 1943, Argentina. Lives and works in Argentina), who worked on the floor using sand, lacquer, chalk and carpenter’s glue to form highly textured surfaces that, once set, were coated with thick layers of paint. The exhibition goes on to examine the ways in which artists were using painterly expression to explore themes of mythology and symbolism. Lee Krasner’s work Bald Eagle (1955) returns to Whitechapel Gallery for the first time since her retrospective in 1965. The work describes organic elements in autumnal colours, which, though recognisable, reject assimilation, exploring ideas of metamorphosis and symbolism. Painted one year later in 1956, an intimate untitled work by Iranian artist Behjat Sadr (b. 1924, , France) offers a more solemn experience of these themes, where a linear interplay of oppositional colours emerges from a dark background, evoking a meaningful and personal calligraphy around a central heart of red. Bertina Lopes’ gestural work presents not only Mozambican iconography but also political events. On display are two works from 1969 by Lopes, made after fleeing Mozambique to Portugal and then Rome, as her anti-fascist and anti-colonialist views strengthened, and the political situation in Mozambique became more tumultuous.