Artworks

Nancy Spero
Mother and Children, 1962
Oil on canvas
76.75 x 43.5 inches (195 x 110.5 cm)
(GL7030)

This work is from Spero’s early series titled the Black Paintings. The subjects in these works and their related works-on-paper are lovers, mothers and children, and amorphous, looming creatures—figures allusive of existential oppositions and emotional turmoil. Somber, figurative works made at a time when Pop Art and Minimalism were the main focuses of the art world, the Black Paintings preface Spero’s radical career. They are the first works with the imagery that will occupy her for the rest of her life; the agency of women and women’s complicated role in society – as maternal care giver, but also survivor and leader. Spero worked on the paintings over long periods of time, often at night. Broad, unmeasured strokes of dark oils surround and obscure the figures, enveloping them in a way that is both sensual and haunting. Coded references to the dominance of male painters in the American abstract expressionists are also visible. The Black Paintings present fascinating insight into Spero’s practice, evoking a union of European civilization and history with the raw and uncompromising beauty of contemporary American painting.

In a groundbreaking career surpassing 50 years of practice and encompassing many significant visual and cultural movements including Conceptual Art, Post-Modernism, and Feminism, Nancy Spero made the female experience central to her art and 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. She combined, fractured, and repurposed found imagery and adopted text to comment on contemporary and historical events such as the monstrosities of the Vietnam War, extermination of Jews during the Holocaust, and torture of women in Chile. With raw intensity, Spero executed works on paper and installations that persist as unapologetic statements against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance.

Spero’s work is held in over 50 prominent public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Centre Pompidou, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Gallery, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; and Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Major monographic exhibitions of Spero’s work have been shown at renowned museums including the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico; Centre Pompidou, France; Serpentine Galleries, England; Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; MoMA PS1, New York, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Spain.

Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926. She died in New York City in 2009.