20th Century Women

About

In 1945, Peggy Guggenheim presented the project 31 Women at her legendary venue, Art of This Century Gallery. The following year, a sequel entitled simply Women included the all-over innovator Janet Sobel, subsequently singled out for a solo show at Guggenheim’s mid-town Manhattan space.

In homage to these quintessentially New York stories, The Gallery of Everything presents 20TH CENTURY WOMEN: a salute to the feminist perspective of one of the 20th Century’s most visionary gallerists and collectors - and an adjunct to our gallery’s Janet Sobel presentation at Frieze Masters.

20TH CENTURY WOMEN features sixteen artists and makers from a range of disciplines, linked by a common commitment to their craft and a categoric refusal to adapt to the normative requirements of the masculine and Caucasian art worlds of their time. Featured artists include: Hilma af Klint, Judith Scott, Jann Haworth, Unica Zürn, Eva Švankmajerová, Mary Barnes, Niki de Saint Phalle and others.

The exhibition 20TH CENTURY WOMEN will occupy the ground floor of The Gallery of Everything on Chiltern Street, complemented by a lower ground installation of works on paper by Janet Sobel, who is the subject of the gallery’s Frieze Masters’ Spotlight presentation, curated by Laura Hoptman.

Featured artists: 

Mary Barnes (1923-2001), psychoanalytic case-study and counter-cultural author; 

Marian Spore Bush (1878-1946), New York socialite and monochromatic visionary;

Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964), hospitalised author of a fictional visualised romance; 

Minnie Evans (1892-1987), self-taught technician of a botanical mysticism; 

Guo Fengyi (1942-2010), Chinese scroll painter of interior harmonic balance; 

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881-1962), architect of a post-spiritualist visual vocabulary;

Madge Gill (1882-1961), mediumistic vessel for the illustrations of her spirit-guide;

Jann Haworth (b 1942), cult co-inventor of the 1960’s British cultural aesthetic; 

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), secretive author of a spontaneous cosmic theory; 

Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), Warhol-feted preacher, musician and bible-painter;

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), famed fabricator of autobiographic pop; 

Judith Scott (1943-2005), non-verbal Californian fabric artist and sculptor;

Eva Švankmajerová (1940-2005), iconic Czech surrealist painter and puppeter; 

Emma Kunz (1892-1963), renowned creator of hand-drawn healing charts;

Anna Zemánková (1908-1986), illustrator of her own private imagined botany;

Unica Zürn (1916-1970), author of anagrammatic poems and automatic image;