We take a look at what is being said about the Whitechapel Gallery’s latest exhibition.
The Guardian: *** “But not everything is equally distinguished, powerful, or even individual. With its clamour of voices, approaches, touches, tempos, styles, its wild differences in scale, surface treatment, materiality and intention, there are surprises and discoveries here, great things and dismal things, anxious things and angry things. There is exuberance and rage.”
Time Out: **** “So they got a bit over-excited and went a bit too far. But with paintings this beautiful, and stories this desperately in need of telling by artists so unfairly ignored by history, who can blame them?”
iNews: “After several remarkable years of exhibitions foregrounding individual or groups of artist women, this exhibition signals the urgent beginning of a new phase. The once prevailing view that women artists are freakish anomalies feels like a distant, and barely credible memory. Instead of wedging women into the existing narrative, this exhibition shows just how faulty even the most persuasive orthodoxies can be. And if a construct as engaging and persistent as AbEx can be so brilliantly dismantled, then really the heavily reinforced door of art history is left swinging on its hinges. It’s time to take the whole house down.”
Evening Standard: *** “While it’s a survey, it’s also a gathering of 80 voices, and that’s both its strength and weakness. It manages to convey the sheer breadth of abstract experimentation with real rigour. The Japanese artist Yuki Katsura produced fields of colour with almost vein like textures, Wook-kyung Choi from South Korea created highly coloured and densely layered collages of paint; both brought their singular languages to New York.”
The Telegraph:**** “Whitechapel’s riveting show of female painters deftly scotches abstract expressionism’s reputation for being an all-male club.”
The FT: “Bursting with feeling, this exhibition is a landmark, celebrating so many women who found their own voices and swelled the global scene of abstract expressionism. As Frankenthaler wrote, “If it’s beautiful and it works, hooray!”
To find out more visit: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/action-gesture-paint-women-and-global-abstraction-1940-70/