Nan Goldin
Most famously working through themes of love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality, Goldin used her personal experiences to visualise the political nature of these subjects, especially when subjugated by social taboos and expectations.
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Roni Horn
Roni Horn played a major role in developing the visual and material language of Minimalism. From the 1980s onwards, she began to create sculptures that picked up on the movement’s interest in materials, yet ventured into Post-Minimalism by emphasizing the centrality of the viewer’s mind and body to the work’s meaning.
Nell Blaine
Though not recognized as widely as she should be, Nell Blaine’s career stands as a microcosm of post-World War II stylistic tendencies – from gestural Abstract Expressionism to the geometries of pure abstraction and eventually to a lyrical realism that included still lifes, landscapes, and interior views.
Dora Carrington
Carrington never achieved fame as an artist during her lifetime. This can be attributed the fact that she rarely exhibited, or even signed, her work, along with the fact that she was not working in the most current styles.
Julie Mehretu
Whilst Mehretu’s art is inspired by events taking place in Africa and the Middle East, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. According to the artist, her work is not all about “blackness” or “otherness.” She believes that there is a failure to “simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large, abstract paintings” and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.
Tamara de Lempicka
In both her life and her art, Tamara de Lempicka offered a new image of the modern woman: part jazz-age femme fatale, libertine and social climber, and part canny self-promoter, self-styled experimental artist and astute cultural and historical prognosticator. In many ways, Lempicka’s artistic output has been assessed as inseparable from her larger-than-life character and, more significantly, her gender.
Marie Laurencin
Laurencin’s influence can be seen across the work of a number of artists who have employed visual languages of femininity in order to explore the place of women and gender expectations in modern life. Louise Bourgeois, Laurencin’s most celebrated student, similarly used clothing and other symbols of womanhood in order to explore female relationships, using psychoanalytic ideas to consider familial relationships, the human body and emotional states.
Yayoi Kusama
More important than the impact her diverse work has on the art market is its influence on other artists and movements, which spans generations. To this day, she represents herself as a lone wolf most comfortable with being known as independently avant-garde.
Romaine Brooks
The style of Romaine Brooks’ art in many ways defies classification and does not easily fit into one stylistic category. However, she has been most frequently linked to the movements of Aestheticism and Symbolism because of her leaning towards the non-narrative and the romantic and lyrical qualities of her portraits. While Brooks did not embrace the vivid colors of many of her fellow modernists, she nevertheless made the same bold and somewhat simplified expressive gestural lines as her contemporary Fauves and Cubists. Her portraits are unapologetically honest and real in the same way that the likes of much later twentieth century portraitists, including Alice Neel and Lucian Freud took on board.
Claude Cahun
Cahun’s artistic work, diverse personae, and unusual personal life have made Cahun a figure of inspiration and interest for many later artists. The gender-shifting self-presentation, and non-heterosexual relationship make Cahun important to homosexual activists and Feminism-lovers alike. Furthermore, Cahun’s use of photography in self-portraiture sees the beginnings of an important emerging tradition among non-male artists.