Doing Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics

Experimental artist Carolee Schneemann is best known for her boundary-pushing work exploring the body politic. The first major exhibition in London dedicated to the radical feminist artist explores her diverse, transgressive and interdisciplinary work that addresses urgent issues such as sexual expression, gender, bodily taboos and women’s role in art and society.

Spanning six decades, it brings together over 300 paintings, sculptural assemblages, performance photographs, films and large-scale multimedia installations, as well as rarely seen archival material including scores, sketches, scrapbooks, programmes and costumes.

Highlights include the artist’s rarely seen early gestural paintings and her innovative works made using her own body, among them Up to and Including Her Limits (1976), for which she hung naked from a harness suspended in the corner of a paper-lined stage set.
Shown together, they reveal Schneemann to be one of the most trailblazing feminist artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Add to your September to-do list now.