For Art's Sake-1

Curated by Kelly Doley and Amanda Rowell, the exhibition – which follows Janis, an earlier exhibition at a small artist-run gallery – features the work of female artists not represented by commercial dealers including Bonita Bub, Jenny Christmann, Sarah Goffman, Gail Hastings and Sarah Rodigari. Alongside the show is a publication with contributions from women in the arts, including artists, gallerists, arts advisors, broadcasters, academics, and writers. The efforts of the curators to create a sense of identity and purpose for contemporary female artists that also looks back to the history of feminism has produced a palpable wave through the Sydney art world. People are talking about the show: debating its ambitions and potential outcomes.

...Feminism remains one of the most important philosophical and ideological movements of the 20th century, changing the way we think about the making and understand of art, amongst other things. Despite all this, the very real inequalities of the contemporary world mean that a return to basics is required every decade or so. While nostalgia is often defined as a kind of cultural malady, it can also have a positive effect when it empowers a new generation to self-awareness and realisation.

An exhibition showcasing six female abstract artists poses questions about the real impact of gender on output and perception in the art world.

...The exhibition raises two questions (amongst many) that I want to address briefly here. Is there anything specific to say about women and abstraction: does gender matter when art sheds all references except to its own processes and potentialities as colour, line, space, surface, rhythm and so forth or when it seeks to commune with abstract forces and effects we call nature?

Yet Riley is also the artist who commented in the early 1970s, that women artists needed feminism - attention to gender issues - like they needed a hole in the head. Understandably she belongs to a generation of artists for whom modern art offered the wonderful opportunity to ‘be an artist’, simply and firmly engaged with artistic questions. Yet when the great American abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler died in 2011, the obituary writers repeated over and over again her disdain for feminists even while it was feminist writers who wrote some of the most interesting and appreciative analyses of her work, taking her much more seriously than the art historians who simply allowed her work only to be a ‘bridge between Pollock and what came after’.

Surrealism led to feminism and after that nothing was ever the same.