“The great journey into space”
Valentine
After a first solo show in 2009 the young and innovative gallery Broadway 1602 created in 2005 by German curator and art critic Anke Kempkes presents this spring and summer 2012 a brand new show on the Belgian woman Pop Artist Evelyne Axell. In the last decade the importance and the very subtle and somehow provocative input of the very few female artists in the Anglo-Saxon male dominated world of Pop Art became an increasing reality and is now knowing a real reconnaissance in museums and art galleries.
Axell’s works figured in the first exhibition on female Pop Art “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968” (Brooklyn Museum, NY, and University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, 2010) and featured in its European counterpart “Power Up, Female Pop Art” (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, and Bietigheim-Bissingen Städtische Galerie, Germany, 2011) while three solo exhibitions “Evelyne Axell: Contestatory Images”, Wiels, Brussels, Belgium, “La Terre est ronde”, Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany and “Axelleration”, Retrospective, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, 2011 gave the European public a chance to rediscover her paintings.
The first exhibition in New York in 2009 presented mainly the last works created by Evelyne Axell – essentially the 1970 – 1972 period – and enamel on Plexiglas technique. This new show spans across 8 years of intense creativity and many different techniques including oil on canvas, collage, drawing and even “objects-jacking”.
THE GREAT JOURNEY INTO SPACE shows the artist’s interest in female space travel as well as the dimension of allegorical space in her work. The sixties were marked by male exclusive symbols such as automobile and space travel. The first theme had already been widely depicted by Axell in her “Erotomobiles” series of paintings. The next step was space travel.
At the time only one woman had ever been into space; Valentina Terechkova, the youngest Russian cosmonaut and still today the only woman to have travelled alone in space. An uttermost loneliness that Axell also resented and expressed in the two 1965 paintings “Seule, une femme” (Alone, a woman) and “Une femme, seule” (A lonely woman) as her TV director husband had left for a long time in the Soviet Union to make a documentary series, including an episode on … Valentina Terechkova!
So in 1966 she created one of the most singular painting/assemblage, using a toy astronaut helmet from her son, representing a woman’s silhouette stripped by a zipper, as an homage to the first woman astronaut and called it “Valentine”.
In 1969 Axell organized a “Happening” at Foncke Gallery in Ghent, Belgium, bringing into the crowd a young woman wearing nothing but an astronaut helmet, which disguised her identity (being the wife of a well known collector who had mingled before with the audience). Against the background of a languorous music Axell then dressed her model like a reversed striptease. Broadway 1602 presents a number of photographs of this exceptional event.
The gallery also made a selection of drawings and preparatory works rarely shown previously and is presenting for the first time in New York some of the early works such as “La machine érotique ou Conception du Mec Art” (1964), “La conductrice et son double ou Les DS” (1965) or the almost life-sized transparency work in Clartex “La clôture ou La cloison” (1967).
“La cloture or La cloison” 1967
Opening April 30, 2012, 6 PM BROADWAY 1602 GALLERY
1181 Broadway, Floor 3
New York, NY 10001
USA
Phone +1 212 481 0362
Fax +1 212 481 1699
Email: gallery@broadway1602.com
www.broadway1602.com
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