Viewing Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940 -1970

The world heads to East London for a major new retrospective of female artists, across three decades and a breadth of global locations. Bringing together 150 artists over 80 artists across the globe, this exhibition is a big exploration of the importance and influence of female abstraction and a revision of its story.

The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner (1908-1984) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985). More than half of the works have never before been on public display in the UK and there is focus on regions such as Latin America, China, Japan, Iran and elsewhere which to date have been overlooked.

The New York critic Harold Rosenberg heralded this gestural form of abstraction as a liberation. “At a certain moment,” he famously wrote in 1952, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.”

At this point in time gestural abstraction was perceived as a heroic encounter with the self. Attacking the canvas like a “punch in the face” (The Guardian) world renowned artists burst with colour next to the lesser known quickly destroying the myth that abstract expressionism was an all-male club. A must see.