Hannah Wilke @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Berverly Hills - Flowers 1973 - 1991

Hannah Wilke

Flowers 1973 - 1991

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Berverly Hills

January 28 – March 25, 2023

HANNAH WILKE

Untitled, n.d.

Watercolor on paper, 12 x 9 inches

© The Estate of Hannah Wilke, courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents Flowers 1973-1991, an exhibition of drawings by the late American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993). This exhibition will focus on the flower image and includes works in watercolor and sepia ink on paper. It will also include a grouping of three of Wilke’s abstract vaginal forms in ceramic from the 1970’s, highlighting the relationship between her works on paper and her threedimensional sculpture. A pioneering figure in feminist art, Hannah Wilke explored issues of beauty, gender, and Western cultural convention with a diverse approach that included photography, performance, video, sculpture, and drawing. The first woman of her generation to make vaginal art, Hannah Wilke asserted ownership over her own body and was a key figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960’s and 70’s.

Hannah Wilke’s multi-disciplinary practice melded Post-Minimalism, second wave feminism and Abstract Expressionism, making her one of the most influential yet under recognized artists of the late 20th century. Wilke’s works on paper are often in dialogue with her sculpture. Rarely exhibited before her death in 1993, drawings were an integral part of her practice beginning in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. While Wilke’s undulating lines often generate highly abstracted compositions that relate to her sculpture, this exhibition will focus on a series of recognizable floral images which are closely linked to her threedimensional organic forms.

Hannah Wilke’s sketches of flowers embody a delicate and ambiguous beauty and come from the same energy exemplified in her performances. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in the artist’s monograph (Hannah Wilke, 2010, Prestel) “Her observations were acute, bringing to life every particularity of texture and form, blooming health and decay without sacrifice to the delicacy for which flowers are treasured.” Wilke continued to produce flower drawings until her death, with some of the final examples done on hospital pillowcases.

HANNAH WILKE (b. New York, NY, 1940; d. Houston, TX, 1993) trained at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. Key solo museum exhibitions during her life included Hannah Wilke: Scarification Photographs and Videotapes, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, (1976); and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri (1989). Recent solo presentations of her work include Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2022), Hannah Wilke: Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2008) and a solo gallery at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). Hannah Wilke has also been included in significant group exhibitions, including: Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, Acquavella Galleries, New York (2021), Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London (2016); Human Nature, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Naked Before the Camera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, MoMA, New York, NY (2010); elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2009-10): WACK!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Sexual Politics, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 1996. Her work is featured in major museum and foundation collections including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Princeton University Art Museum; and Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City.

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - Erotic Abstraction - Curated by Eleanor Nairne

Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke

Erotic Abstraction 

Curated by Eleanor Nairne 

Acquavella Galleries, New York 

Through June 18, 2021 

Acquavella Galleries presents Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, the first exhibition to present these two pioneering artists side by side. Curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the show features 23 works made between 1965 and 1977, including foundational works in the history of post-Minimalist and feminist art. 

Living in New York in the 1960s, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke seemed at times to be working on parallel, if not entirely synchronized, tracks. Both turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s, and both became renowned for their experiments with form and materials, teaching sculpture at the School of Visual Arts at different times. Neither artist felt fully at ease with the language of Minimalism, which was ascendant in the New York art scene. As Eleanor Nairne writes, “Hesse and Wilke shared in the desire to adopt and subvert the strict geometries of Minimalism; softening the language of cool detachment with a sense of physical touch.” Bringing a bodily sensibility to the rigid and sterile structures of Minimalism, each artist in her own way created work that was evocative, organic and sensual. 

Central to this pursuit for both artists was the embrace of materials not widely used in sculpture in the 1960s, such as fiberglass and liquid latex. Erotic Abstraction features groundbreaking works from each artist in this highly expressive medium, as well as hybrid relief paintings and experimental works on paper. Ringaround Arosie (1965), made the first year that Hesse became fully engaged in sculpture, features a pair of mounds coming to a point at the center, each made of a spiral of electrical wire. Wilke’s Ponder-r-rosa 1 (1974) is the earliest work still extant by the artist made of liquid latex, a then newly-available industrial material whose use Hesse had pioneered a few years earlier. Presenting blooms made of folded circles of the soft black material bound together by metal fasteners, Ponder-r-rosa 1 shares not only innovative construction techniques with Ringaround Arosie, but also playful titles hinting at the works’ corporeal forms.

The exhibition includes important loans from The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art, The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles, as well as many private collections.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue accompanies the exhibition featuring critical essays by curator Eleanor Nairne, professor and author Jo Applin, art historian Anne M. Wagner, art historian and curator Amy Tobin, and gallery director Michael Findlay.

ELEANOR NAIRME joined the Barbican Art Gallery in London as Curator in 2015. Her exhibitions include Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep (2016), Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017-18) and, most recently, the acclaimed retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Colour, which was shown in 2019 at the Barbican and the Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and in 2020 at the Zentrum Paul Kee, Bern, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has just opened Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. Nairne is also a writer for publications including the London Review of Books and The New York Times.

EVA HESSE was born January 11, 1936, in Hamburg. Her family fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1939. She attended the School of Industrial Art, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and Cooper Union before receiving her B.F.A. from the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University in 1959. After returning to New York, Hesse worked as a textile designer, and in 1961 she was included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and at the John Heller Gallery, New York. Her first solo show of sculpture was presented at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 1965. Hesse began to use latex to make sculpture in 1967, and then fiberglass the following year. By the late 1960s, she gained critical recognition with solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and inclusion in many important group exhibitions. In 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after three operations within a year, she died on May 29, 1970.

Related Post:

Eva Hesse: Sculpture, Jewish Museum, New York, May 12 - September 17, 2006

HANNAH WILKE was born Arlene Hannah Butter in 1940, in New York. She attended the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, graduating with a BFA in 1961 and B.S. in Education in 1962. She used various mediums to challenge prevailing notions of femininity, feminism, and sexuality, and was one of the first artists to use vaginal imagery in her work with the purpose of directly engaging with feminist issues. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Wilke worked on creating a type of female iconography based on the body, constructing abstract, organic forms, often displayed in a highly organized and repetitious manner that recalled Minimalism. A large selection of her early terra cotta sculptures was first shown in 1971 at Feigen Downtown in Ten Painters, One Sculptor, curated by Michael Findlay. During the 1970s, Hannah Wilke began to use her own body for performance pieces as well as photographic work that she called her "performalist self-portraits." She exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad during her lifetime. In the late 1980s Wilke was diagnosed with cancer and struggled with the illness for the last years of her life. Before her death, she documented the ravaging effects of her illness and cancer treatments on her body in a series of self-portraits. These large, color photographs were some of Hannah Wilke's last works before she died on January 28, 1993.

Related Posts:

Hannah Wilke: Friendship, LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston, February 18 - April 10, 2021

Hannah Wilke, Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 27 September - 21 December 2018

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Hannah Wilke @ LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston - Friendship

Hannah Wilke: Friendship

LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston

February 18 - April 10, 2021

For the first time in more than 20 years, LaiSun Keane presents an exhibition of an exclusive group of works by Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) to Boston titled Hannah Wilke: Friendship. The exhibition illuminates the friendship between Hannah Wilke and Deena Axelrod.  

Hannah Wilke and Deena Axelrod’s youths were informed by 60s feminism, which was foregrounded by huge social and cultural shifts. Their lives converged in many ways which impacted their family, friends and most importantly, Hannah Wilke’s art making. The works in this exhibition show how Hannah Wilke’s art and their personal lives were intertwined. Hannah Wilke’s art WAS very much her life and it seeps into every aspect, be it through friends and family members or famous lovers. 

A pertinent example of the Deena Axelrod’s connection to Hannah Wilke’s work is Bar Mitzvah, 1985 which was produced by repurposing Mayan Axelrod’s Bar Mitzvah invitation into her famous chewing gum artwork. Notably, in a beautiful gesture, Hannah Wilke re-gifted the work to Mayan Axelrod hence making it a forever memento for the bond between her and the Axelrod family. 

Together with the exhibition, is a catalogue essay by Anya Ventura who conducted a lengthly interview with Mayan Axelrod for her piece. In her essay, she discussed the importance of the women’s friendship with tender anecdotes. This allows us to see a side of Hannah Wilke in a deeply personal and meaningful way. It is undeniable that Hannah Wilke was very much a formidable force but she had a strong support system in this friendship. Deena Axelrod was there all along, to inspire, to support and to comfort until Hannah Wilke’s premature death at 52.  

This solo exhibition in Boston is the first since her group show at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, in 1996. Her one and only solo exhibition in Boston was at the now defunct Genovese Gallery in 1990. 

LAISUNE KEANE

460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118

www.laisunkeane.com

___________________

Hannah Wilke @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Hannah Wilke

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

27 September - 21 December 2018

"Since 1960 I have been concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female... Human gestures, multi-layered metaphysical symbols below the gut level translated into an art close to laughter, making love, shaking hands... Eating fortune cookies instead of signing them, chewing gum into androgynous objects... Delicate definitions... Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint, or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed... continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs...."

Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press, 1989, p.139.

Alison Jacques Gallery presents an exhibition spanning three decades of the American painter, sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist HANNAH WILKE (1940 - 1993), in partnership with The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles.

Hannah Wilke's firm legacy as a pioneering, often controversial, feminist and conceptual artist is evident not only in her early use of vaginal imagery as a feminist intervention but also in her radical choice of materials. The use of terracotta and ceramic, latex, chewing gum and erasers was unusual for this time period and their characteristics of malleability and fragility reflect the sense of vulnerability that is consistent throughout Hannah Wilke's practice.

Over the last decade, major museums have acknowledged Hannah Wilke's previously overlooked importance through significant acquisitions: MoMA, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Tate, London recently acquired Hannah Wilke's iconic installation Elective Affinities (1978) consisting of 76 glazed porcelain white sculptures laid out in grid-like formats; a maquette for this work, Untitled (1977), is included in the current exhibition.

Bringing together works from the early 1960s through to 1987, this is the first time since Wilke's death in 1993 that her paintings on canvas from the 60s have been exhibited. The colours of these works and the forms depicted, relate to many of Hannah Wilke's drawings and sculptures. Other lesser-known intensely coloured small-scale works on paper are shown alongside Hannah Wilke's iconic performance photographs including Gestures (Triptych), (1974 - 76) in which the artist stretches and contorts her face directly at the camera, using her skin as a malleable sculptural medium. As Hannah Wilke explained Gestures shows "the pathos past the posing" and this reference to primal female instinct was fundamental to her thinking.

From the beginning, drawing was central to Hannah Wilke's practice as well as her considered use of colour. The early abstract works on paper and card from the 60s, often in charcoal, pastel and pencil reference the body sexually with yonic and phallic shapes merging within floral landscapes to create sensual abstract forms. As Hannah Wilke stated, she was concerned with creating: "a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract. Its content has always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions." (Hannah Wilke, A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press, 1989, p.139).

Central to the exhibition is one of Hannah Wilke's largest installations, Untitled, (1974 - 77) consisting of 103 painted flesh-coloured terracotta sculptures. Although the forms are arranged in a scattered configuration they are, as with many of Hannah Wilke's multi-part sculptures, confined within the minimalist square and show "Wilke's subversion of the Minimalist/Conceptualist concern with systems, while also demonstrating her genius for fusing her personal, bodycentric feminism with the formal issues and rigorous philosophy of Conceptualism " (Paige K. Bradley, Artforum, October 2014).

HANNAH WILKE (born Arlene Hannah Butter, New York, NY, 1940; d. Hannah Wilke, Houston, TX, 1993). Wilke studied at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia and taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York (1974 - 1992). Wilke had two solo museum exhibitions during her life: Hannah Wilke: Starification Photographs and Videotapes, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine (1976); and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri, Missouri (1989) as well as a posthumous museum survey show; Gestures curated by Tracy Fitzpatrick, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY (2009).

Recent major group exhibitions include: Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings, Tate St Ives, UK (2018); Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950 - 1980, Met Breuer, New York (2017); Generation Loss: 10 Years of the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2017); Campaign for Art, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2016); The Imaginary Museum, Tate Liverpool, UK (2015) toured to MMK, Frankfurt and Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2016); and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016, Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles (2016).

The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles was founded in 1999 by Hannah Wilke's sister Marsie Scharlatt and her family, and has been represented by Alison Jacques Gallery since 2009. 

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY

16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com