After Berlin, König London hosts Evelyne Axell’s third solo show in the UK.
From June 28 till July 28, 2018.
By appointment only in August 2018.
Following the success of the “Venus, Leda & Mona Lisa” show at König Galerie in Berlin, curator Angela Stief presents a new approach to Evelyne Axell’s work in the very special König London Gallery.
Ideally located in central London, the gallery is in fact an ancient underground car park. It gives a curious resonance to the show; the equation of car and female body being one of her main subjects in her early work and knowing that she died in a car crash in 1972.
Vanessa Curry of Fine Art Source wrote:
Evelyne Axell – forerunning practitioner of Pop Art alongside Feminism; two ends of the art spectrum mostly seen as extremes.
Traditionalists define Pop as masculine and Feminists complained of the denigration of the feminine in it. Those sands of research are shifting and Axell’s work is being unearthed. 9 years ago, under the direction of Linda Nochlin, Kalliopi Minioudaki wrote a dissertation: “Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality” (IFA/NYU, 2009). It became a precursor to the first exhibition to explore that discourse -‘Power Up-Female Pop Art’ at Kunsthalle Wien 2010-2011.
Axell created her pictorial Pop works over a 7 year period 1965-1972 and that exhibition revealed a section of art history that had been communicated wrongly. In feminist art history’s view, feminism only begins in 1969, thus women working in Pop art before the official start of feminism were not feminists (Minioudaki is forced to call them “proto-feminists”).
Women Pop artists were l ignored first by the critical establishment and later by feminist writers (Seductive Subversion, Sachs/Minioudaki 2010). Axell’s film director husband was friends with Magritte & introduced them to each other; in 1964 she studied with Magritte for a full year. She was the only student Magritte ever had. In the key year of Warhol’s work with the image of Jackie, she started working parallel on her own portraits.
The materials she used to make them were plastics that had not been seen in the context of fine art previously -her use of Clartex (a plastic material that was only produced commercially for 1 year for use in furniture) and plexiglass created her ability to play with translucidity; she layered colour enamel-covered plastic resins to create definition and colour transparency. Her new wave of collage/craft work placed it exactly at that moment in time because of the materials used, whilst reflecting on the tradition of craft that had been the base for expanding female art history during the Bauhaus era.
KÖNIG LONDON
259-269 OLD MARYLEBONE ROAD
LONDON NW1 5RA
UNITED KINGDOM
OPENING HOURS
WED – SAT 11AM – 6PM
OR BY APPOINTMENT
T +44 20 725 838 83
THE GALLERY WILL BE OPEN BY APPOINTMENT ONLY THROUGH THE MONTH OF AUGUST 2018
