Taking a Broom to the Wasps’ Nest tracks seven artist’s unique contemporary interpretation of ‘abstract’, whilst placing them firmly within their feminist art historical context. The exhibition highlights the fluidity, individuality, and freedom inherent in abstraction, regardless of gender, presenting the vastness of what can be considered abstract.
Pictorum Gallery London is delighted to present Taking a Broom to the Wasp's Nest. This will be the gallery's inaugural exhibition, showing the work of six exceptional women abstract artists: Jo Dennis, Kim Booker, Lydia Hamblet, Rhiannon Salisbury, Sunyoung Hwang, Yaya Yajie Liang.
The title of the exhibition, Taking a Broom to the Wasp's Nest, is taken from the poem Abstract by Connie Wanek. The title touches on a sense of urgency and movement, responding directly to both the formal elements of the artists' works and the wider art historical context that they exist within.
Throughout art history, abstract painting has been supposedly dominated by men, and largely remembered as a movement defined by the paint-slinging, hard-drinking machismo of its poster boys Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The women who helped define and push the movement forward have consequently fallen out of the art historical spotlight, reduced to titles such as 'wife of ' or 'disciple'. According to (mostly male) art historians, it was Kandisnsky (1866 - 1944) who birthed the movement through his work Untitled (1910), paving the way for male artists such as Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock, and Mondrian to dominate. However it was in fact Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) that created the first abstract compositions in 1905, 5 years before the so-called "father of abstraction" Kandinsky. Her work, alongside other pioneering women artists such as Agnes Martin, are testament to the powerful backdrop of women who heavily influence abstract artists today.