Visual Art > Painting Archives - Page 23 of 24

Adrian Piper

Piper’s distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential.

Margaret Rose Preston

Margaret Preston was a leading painter, printmaker and designer.

Miné Okubo

War internee and artist, Miné Okubo is well known for her representations of daily life and humanity. She is most famous for her drawings depicting Japanese and Japanese American internment during World War II.

Rachel Ruysch

Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch still-life painter who specialized in flowers, creating her own style and earning international fame in her lifetime. With a long and successful career that spanned more than 60 years, she became the most well-documented woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age.

Virginie Bovie

Virginie Bovie was a Belgian painter and arts patron, well-known in her time but later largely forgotten. Current whereabouts are only known for seven of her more than 200 works.

Lili Elbe

Lili Elbe was a Danish painter – successful under her birth name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – and transgender woman who was an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery.
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and they married in 1904. They worked as illustrators, Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. The couple travelled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman and posed as Gottlieb’s sister-in-law. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automne in Paris. Elbe stopped painting after her transition.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb’s model who was late for a sitting. By the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented as Lili, attending various parties and entertaining guests in her house. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel, petites femmes fatales with Elbe as model.
Elbe went to Germany in 1930 for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. She underwent four operations over two years and her case became a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court annulled the Elbe and Gottelieb’s marriage in October 1930 and Elbe was able to have her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. She returned to Dresden and adopted the surname Elbe in honor of the Elbe River. In 1931, she had her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal, which made her the second transgender woman to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.
Elbe’s immune system rejected the transplanted uterus, and the operation and a subsequent surgical revision caused infection, leading to her death from cardiac arrest on 13 September 1931, three months after the surgery.The US and UK English versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. In 2000, The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Elbe’s life, became an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. In 2015, it was made into a film of the same title – although critically acclaimed, the film was criticised for casting an English cisgender man (Eddie Redmayne) to play a Danish transgender woman.

Élisabeth Sophie Chéron

Although Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron is best remembered today as a painter, she was actually a true Renaissance woman, acclaimed during her lifetime as a talented poet, musician, artist, and academicienne. In her childhood, she was trained by her father in the arts of enamelling and miniature painting. Under the sponsorship of the prominent artist Charles Le Brun, she was admitted to the Académie Royale of Paris as a portrait painter in 1672. She exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris, while also producing poetry and translations; she was fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Chéron’s literary talent was recognized in 1694 when she was named a member of Italy’s Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, and given the academician name of Erato, after the muse of lyric and love poetry.

Aasta Hansteen

In her younger days, Norwegian feminist Aasta Hansteen earned her living as a portrait painter in Kristiania (modern-day Oslo)’ she was in demand as the city’s only portrait artist. Her most famous painting is possibly her portrait of her father, which is on permanent exhibit at the National Gallery of Norway. Associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, she exhibited her work at the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris. Well known in the Oslo’s intellectual circles, Hansteen inspired characters in dramas by Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg. Her writings advocating for the rights of women, her opposition to religious authority, and her provocative behavior—she often appeared fpr public speaking engagements wearing men’s boots and brandishing a whip in a symbolic performance of the oppressor—led to such harassment that in 1880 she emigrated to the United States. Together with her foster daughter Theodora Nielsen, she sailed from Christiania on April 9, 1880. In Boston, she met leading feminists of the day, including Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and Mary Livermore, and was deeply affected by the relative freedom of women in America. By 1889, when she returned to Norway, the feminist movement there was firmly established, and Hansteen was embraced as one of its pioneers. In 1889, she returned to Norway, joined the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights (Norsk Kvinnesaksforening) and became an active contributor in the press on women’s rights
She also studied linguistics, with an interest in Norwegian dialects. In 1862 she published anonymously a small book written in Nynorsk, becoming the first woman to publish in the language.

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, and the sister of Virginia Woolf. Exhibiting in London and Paris, she was one of the most celebrated painters of the Bloomsbury Group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. Bell rejected the restrictions of Victorian narrative painting and the focus on what were considered ideal and aberrant qualities of femininity. She also designed book jackets for all of her sister Virginia’s books that were published by Virginia’s publishing company, the Hogarth Press. In 1932, Bell and Duncan Grant were commissioned to produce a dinner service for art historian Kenneth Clark. Overseen by Kenneth’s wife Jane Clark, they created the Famous Women Dinner Service – 50 plates painted with portraits of notable women throughout history.

Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artist known for her contribution to Australia’s Women’s Art Movement and her active advocacy within community arts. She has participated in countless exhibitions in her more than 50-year career, and her works are held in the collections of several major museums. She has worked across a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing, and is respected among her Australian and global contemporaries, particularly within the feminist community.
Binns’ interest in community arts came from a desire to make the art world accessible to everyone, beyond the restrictions of art institutions. She believed creative expression was an inherent part of the human experience, and not allowing for this expression freely was a form of “social control”. In 1973 Binns worked as a field officer for the Australia Council for the Arts Community Arts Program, visiting regional areas to “investigate needs, resources and possibilities”.
In 1972 Binns collaborated with fellow artist on The Artsmobile, a travelling community arts project that brought Dada and Surrealist style performance work to centres along New South Wales’ north east coast. Described as “the offspring of a marriage between Fluxus and a local town council bookmobile”, the Artsmobile brought art-based activities to schools, seniors centres and public parks.
She later developed Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories in 1978 during her artist’s residency at the University of New South Wales. The project recalled the “lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere”, by facilitating a space where participants could come and share stories of craft and needlework skills that they had been taught from their mothers and other members of their family. Described as “dense, fragmented, [and] multilayered” the final work was exhibited as a series of postcards installed on a postcard rack.
Binns began work on her next major community art project Full Flight in 1983, spending months in various towns of the Central West region of New South Wales, facilitating workshops, mural painting and skill sharing to celebrate “the creativity of ordinary people.”
Feminism was often present in Binns’ work, and she was a leader in the development of The Women’s Art Movement (WAM), which aimed to address discrimination and sexism within the art world through various actions and exhibitions. A major project was the documentation of women’s artwork through the development of the Women’s Art Register.
Binns’ first solo exhibition in 1967 in Sydney featured works such as Vag Dens and Phallic Monument and has been recognised as a key starting point for the development of feminist art in Australia. This exhibition was one of the first of its kind, predating Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and “critically affirming the power of women’s sexuality whilst also provoking… a good measure of castration anxiety amongst the patriarchy”.
Binns was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1983 for Services to Art and Craft, and the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to Community Arts in 1985. Living in Canberra, she has been a Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Australian National University’s School of Art.