Here Are 5 Women Artists Who Dominated Berlin Gallery Weekend, Despite Evidence of German Gender Bias
Sculptor Senga Nengundi and pop painter Evelyne Axell were among those getting the spotlight.
Kate Brown, May 3, 2018
At Gallery Weekend this year, the gender split was not quite balanced: Some 22 female artists were exhibited as solo or two-person shows out of the 58 solo or two-person exhibitions included on the official bill—far less than half. And yet, over the course of the weekend’s non-stop openings and receptions, the most buzzed-about exhibitions were decidedly in the female category. Many of these accomplished artists were even having their Berlin debuts.
The increased collective presence of these big presentations by women could almost be read as a statement—that is, if the distinct exhibitions were not so significant in and of themselves.
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Evelyne Axell at König Galerie
In “Venus, Leda, & Mona Lisa,” the undersung but historically grounded Pop painter Evelyne Axell posthumously returns to Germany with a large exhibition that spans Johann König’s two locations. In her early years, the Belgian artist had visited surrealist René Magritte twice a month during the year of 1964, where she developed her unique oil painting technique before she began experimenting with enamel on her well-regarded cut-out panels.
To handle the task of managing Axell’s extensive body of work, the gallery enlisted Austrian curator Angela Stief, who has an ongoing relationship with the painter’s practice. Stief had curated Axell into a groundbreaking revisionist exhibition at Kunsthalle Vienna in 2011 entitled “Power Up—Female Pop Art” which featured Axell, Sister Corita, Dorothy Iannone, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others.
At their location in the former St. Agnes church, the gallery is showing vibrant tropical painting series with cut-out forms of animals that extend beyond the boundaries of the frames. The show then extends to their former Dessauerstrasse location where some of works are on view for the first time, having been restored in collaboration with the artist’s estate, which is managed by her son.
Here, provocative celebrations of female sexuality abound. There is the most iconic woman of all, Mona Lisa, as a psychedelic rendering; there is the Spartan goddess Leda, and a nude self-portrait of the artist herself. Several drawn studies for paintings show Axell’s working process. Interwoven within these figurative works are a series of highly saturated images of women behind the wheel of cars or pressing down on the gas pedal with red heels. The latter feel particularly eery, considering the artist died in a tragic car accident outside of Ghent when she was only 37 years old.
