Related artists
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Estate of Ana Mendieta
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Carolee Schneemann
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Estate of Nancy Spero
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Estate of Mildred Thompson
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Galerie Lelong & Co.is pleased to present Legacies: Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero & Mildred Thompson. The presentation will focus on Estates of four legendary female artists who each made profound innovations that have lasting influence on contemporary culture. Galerie Lelong has represented the Estate of Ana Mendieta since 1992; Nancy Spero and the Estate since 2001; the Estate of Mildred Thompson since 2017 and co-represented Carolee Schneemann and the Estate with P•P•O•W, New York since 2015.
In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85) created groundbreaking work in photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Amongst the major themes in her work are exile, displacement, and a return to the landscape, themes that remain profoundly relevant today.
Self-described as a painter whose work was profoundly influenced by 20th century “action painters” and the absence of women in art history, Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, photography, performance, film, video, mixed media, and installations. A pioneer of feminist performance who has transformed the very definition of art, Schneemann’s now canonical performances such as Interior Scroll profoundly changed the narratives on gender, pleasure and power.
In a career surpassing 50 years of practice and encompassing many significant visual and cultural movements including Conceptual Art, Post-Modernism, and Feminism, Nancy Spero (1924-2010) made the female experience central to her art. By doing so, she challenged aesthetic and political conventions. Spero’s lexicon was derived from an immersion in the history of images, notably from Egypt, classical antiquity, pre-history, and contemporary news media.
Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) was a painter and sculptor who lived a life outside the borders for Black women in mid-century. She created work inspired by interests ranging from philosophy and music to mathematics and science. Her paintings often feature thickly textured, brightly saturated color segments painted in linear and circular formations. An exhibition—Throughlines, Assemblages and Works on Paper from the 1960s to the 1990s—is on view at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York through March 27, 2021.
Three of the artists in our presentation were closely aligned. Mendieta, Schneemann and Spero all knew each other in New York and sometimes exhibited together. Mendieta and Spero were both part of the women’s collective, A.I.R.
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Ana Mendieta
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Carolee Schneemann. Photo by Joan Barker.
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Nancy Spero in her 71st Street studio with Codex Artaud II and Codex Artaud II behind her on the wall, New York, 1973. Photo by Susan Weiley.
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Mildred Thompson
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Ana Mendieta Untitled: Silueta Series, 1979 / 2020
Suite of six color photographs
Each: 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Framed, each: 22 1/2 x 28 5/8 x 1 3/8 in (57 x 72.8 x 3.5 cm)
Edition of 12 with 3 AP (GP2622)"In her ongoing explorations of the Siluetas, Mendieta discovered infinite ways to vivify the idea that nature is alive, reproductive and eternal." - from Ana Mendieta: Earth Body by Olga Viso.
This seminal series reveals Mendieta's hybrid of form and documentation and are fugitive and potent traces of the artist’s inscription of her body in the landscape, often transformed by natural elements such as fire and water. Untitled: Silueta Series, 1979 / 2020, a work recently released by the Estate, uses a drawing in gunpowder to capture explosion and express transformation and fecundity.
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Ana Mendieta
Volcán, 1979
signed, titled, dated on reverse
Color photograph
8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
Framed: 13.75 x 17 x 1.75 inches (34.9 x 43.2 x 4.4 cm)
(GL2809-A)
"We need and seek out comfort in the idea of stability and look upon the earth as our home, the imagined foundation of a stable, domestic architecture. Yet the visible earth is a veneer, stretched over a web of geological plates that do not match up. A volcano is the visible, exterior eruption of the earth's visible, interior disaggregation. Mendieta looked upon the earth as a twin metaphor of solace and displacement, never fully one or the other, mediated by time and body. Made in Iowa in 1979, Volcán embraces both facets of this idea." - from Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta by Howard Oransky -
Carolee Schneemann
Meat Joy Collage (performance poster), 1964
Mixed media collage on paper
14 x 8 3/8 in (35.4 x 21.3 cm)
Framed: 18.75 x 13.25 x .75 inches (47.6 x 33.7 x 1.9 cm)
(GL11035)
"Meat Joy, 1964, Fuses, 1964-1966, Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973-1976, and Interior Scroll, 1975, are now considered canonical projects, required entries into any meaningful account of contemporary art, belying their once notoriety as feminist challenges of the very concept of the art historical canon." - Kenneth White in Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable
The body of the artist in relation to the social body as in Meat Joy are examples of Schneemann’s radical approach to drawing, the body and composition. -
Carolee Schneemann
Eye Body #2, 1963 / 1985
Silver gelatin print
Image size: 9.6 x 9.6 inches (24.5 x 24.5 cm)
Framed: 20.75 x 16.75 inches (52.7 x 42.5 cm)
Edition 1 of 2
(GP2100)
"Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera was a private action staged in the artist’s studio without an audience and exists solely in photographic form. The artist wanted to combine her physical, naked presence with the materials of the artistic environment in which she produced paintings and constructions – paint, chalk, grease – so that the female body became simultaneously the active seeing subject and object." - James Cahill, Flying Too Close to the Sun -
Nancy Spero
Bomb, Dove and Victims, 1967
Signed and dated recto
Gouache and ink on paper
24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm)
Framed: 27.9 x 39.6 x 1.5 inches (70.8 x 100.6 x 3.8 cm)
"Spero considered her 1966 decision to work solely on paper an act of defiance. 'Part of my resistance as an artist in the War Series was a decision not to work anymore on canvas. I shifted completely to work on paper. Big canvases carried the male look! The 'establishment'! No was paying attention. I was madder than hell about the war. I figured later on that probably since I had three small sons, I wouldn't want my sons going off to war, the raging Vietnam War I considered an abomination. So the War Series was like an exorcism.'" - from Nancy Spero: The Work by Christopher Lyon -
Nancy Spero
Search and Destroy, D.O.W. N.A.P.A.L.M, 1967
Signed and dated recto, lower right
Gouache and ink on paper
23.75 x 35.25 inches (60.3 x 89.5 cm)
Framed: 27.5 x 39.25 x 1.6 inches (70 x 99.7 x 4 cm)
(GL6113)
"Spero considered her 1966 decision to work solely on paper an act of defiance. 'Part of my resistance as an artist in the War Series was a decision not to work anymore on canvas. I shifted completely to work on paper. Big canvases carried the male look! The 'establishment'! No was paying attention. I was madder than hell about the war. I figured later on that probably since I had three small sons, I wouldn't want my sons going off to war, the raging Vietnam War I considered an abomination. So the War Series was like an exorcism.'" - from Nancy Spero: The Work by Christopher Lyon -
Mildred Thompson
Wood Picture, c. 1967
Found wood, nails, and metal plates
20.5 x 13.6 x 1.1 inches (52.1 x 34.6 x 2.9 cm)
(GL12585)"Thompson began constructing her wood assemblages, which she called Wood Pictures, while living in New York in 1961. She developed them further while living and working in Germany throughout the 1960s. Located somewhere between painting, sculpture, and collage, Thompson's wood works combine found and manipulated wood segments into sophisticated, expressive compositions that represent a unique contribution to art of the period." - from With and Against the Grain: The Early Life and Work of Mildred Thompson by Katie A. Pfohl and Melissa Messina
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Mildred Thompson
Untitled (No #IV), 1973
Silkscreen print on paper
24.1 x 16.9 inches (61.3 x 43 cm)
Framed: 29 7/8 x 23 1/4 x 1 5/8 in (76 x 59 x 4 cm)
Edition 4 of 10 (#4/10)
(GP2314)
"In 1973, Thompson created an eight-part series of serigraph prints signed "Tivoli Strasse 33" for the place where they were made, as was her practice. In these prints, bright blocks of color move and multiply from print to print in loose and semi-orderly patterns that provide a counterpoint to the weighty and more tightly organized segments of her Wood Pictures. Printed in a modernist palette of burnt orange, mustard, violet and forest green, the colors find parallels in the warm tonality and boldly painted sections in several reveal Thompson's wood works from the same period." - from With and Against the Grain: The Early Life and Work of Mildred Thompson by Katie A. Pfohl and Melissa Messina
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