With this new acquisition, the first by a major American museum thanks to a generous donation by Steven and Alexandra Cohen, the work of Belgian artist Evelyne Axell is now permanently housed in some of the world’s leading modern art museums; The Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok) in Vienna, the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon as well as in Belgian museums such as the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the SMAK in Ghent, the Design Museum Brussels, the MuZEE in Ostend and, of course, Le Delta in Namur, her hometown. It is also present in major collections such as the François Pinault Collection in Paris and Venice, the Bracco Foundation in Milan, the Gandur Foundation in Geneva and the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York.
About Axell-ération in the press:
Artforum
Evelyne Axell’s pseudo-self-portrait Axell-ération, 1965, depicted a pair of stockinged feet in patent red stilettos pressing down the pedals of an automobile: As the painting’s title coyly suggests, the feet in question belong to an active subject, master of her own self-representation. A year earlier, her husband, Belgian filmmaker Jean Antoine, made the documentary Dieu est-il Pop? (Is God Pop?), in which he asked James Rosenquist, Allen Jones, and others what role they accord a woman in their paintings. To Jones, a woman’s body was just a form; and the fragmentation that Axell enacts is nothing if not a riposte to such an attitude, defined by a male gaze that relies on tactics of framing and dehumanization.
Anya Harrison (2021)
Axell-eration is the title Evelyne Axell, who shortened her name to the gender-neutral Axell at the beginning of her artistic career, gave to one of her paintings in 1965, and now “Axelleration. Evelyne Axell 1964–1972” is the title of the first extensive solo show in Germany by this Belgian artist, who died in a car crash in 1972. The painting shows the pedals of an automobile being operated by a woman in red high heels. Several characteristics of Pop art come together here: the fascination with speed and the car as a symbol of a new modern lifestyle; bright colors and an emphasis on stencil-like, two-dimensional surfaces, borrowed from an advertising aesthetic; and last but not least, the eroticization of the female body through the use of the quasi-cinematic close-up. But the woman here is not merely the object of the gaze, the focal point of desire. She is active, the one who is stepping on the gas, axellerating.
Astrid Wege (2011)
Le quotidien de l’art
Like the too little known Belgian artist Evelyne Axell, who died in 1972 at the age of 37 in a car accident: among her frankly erotic works, her disturbing premonitory painting Axell-ération (1965) illustrates in acid colours the ardour of female desire through feet arched in glossy pumps, operating the controls of a freewheeling vehicle on the highway of pleasure. Wizz!!!
Magali Lesauvage (2021)
