Whole star score: ★★★★½
The works: ★★★★The present: ★★★★★
Earlier than getting into the principle area of The Girl Query 1550-2025, two work instantly sign the collective temper and feminist ambition of the exhibition: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) and Miriam Cahn’s Should Strike Again (2024). Gentileschi portrays the biblical story of Susanna being preyed on by lecherous elders as she bathes, her panic and discomfort emphasised by the drama of all of the gesturing fingers, the coldness of the stone bench underneath her nude flesh, and the dagger-like shadow underneath her proper foot. Painted on the age of 17—shortly earlier than she was raped by her artwork tutor Agostino Tassi and needed to show her innocence by present process torture by thumbscrew—it maps the non-public and the political by means of allegory. Centuries later, the Swiss painter Cahn’s Should Strike Again additionally defies male aggression in a picture of a unadorned lady—however now she has one hand in her vagina, the opposite in a fist, punching an erect male to her aspect.
That sense of ladies artists working to strike out in opposition to the male gaze and patriarchal society is reiterated with the looping of Gina Birch’s brief movie 3 Minute Scream (1977) over the doorway doorways to the exhibition corridor. Her punk, red-lipped screaming additionally powerfully displays the curator Alison M. Gingeras’s exhibition idea and gathering of virtually 200 works by some 140 girls artists in an enormous, powerfully unruly, survey spanning 500 years.
The exhibition title references “la querelle des femmes”, a phrase utilized by the Medieval courtroom author Christine de Pizan who authored The Ebook of the Metropolis of Girls (1405) about an allegorical area that will defend and preserve the histories of necessary girls.
The guide known as for “lady” as a brand new, prized class of citizen, and this present on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in Warsaw requires her rightful standing as citizen artist. There may be an old-school feminism concerning the exhibition and its banner-like thematic sections. Gingeras has taken inspiration from the pioneering exhibition Ladies Artists 1550-1950, organised by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, which toured US museums in 1976-77. The present can be indebted to Nochlin’s (and Maura Reilly’s) exhibition International Feminisms on the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. However this survey is extra transhistorical and targeted on figurative portray and sculpture, and, critically, at pains to point out that hard-fought feminist victories are underneath fixed risk.
The exhibition opens with the part “Femmes Fortes: Allegories of Businesses”, which incorporates Jane Graverol’s tackle the biblical story Judith and Holofernes (1949) and Lubaina Himid’s allegorical portrait of the ocean goddess Amphitrite as a monumental black lady (2025), adopted by a bit on “Training and the Canon”, reflecting how girls grasp their very own picture and insert themselves into the canon.
Wield a brush like a sword
A gallery themed “Palettes and Energy” makes mastery literal by means of a deal with the palette as an object whose womb form turns into an emblem of empowerment.
That is probably the most cohesive room within the present as throughout one portray after one other girls wield the comb like a sword. Star works similar to Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait on the Easel (1554-56) disprove the concept that girls solely entered the portray academy within the Nineteenth century, whereas Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Neo-Classical Self-Portrait (1786) insists on magnificence plus brains in combining a sensual naked shoulder with a agency grip on her brush. The inclusion of Felicja Curyło’s tempera Self-Portrait (1950-59), a neighborhood artist identified for her people “painted cottage” artwork, is a pointed curatorial resolution—Gingeras rightly taking again girls’s work sometimes marginalised within the people or ethnographic museum. It was additionally a deal with to seek out the younger artist Somaya Critchlow’s X Research the work of Pythagoras (2022) within the combine with its cheeky sensuality mocking the Greek thinker’s discount of the bodily world to numbers.
Vanessa German’s The Blood & The Animals, The Mirror & The Sky, an Ode to the Un-language-able Reality of Is-ness (2017) Robert Glowacki Images
Ladies having fun with their very own our bodies takes a metaphysical flip
Ladies having fun with their very own our bodies takes a metaphysical flip within the “Surrealist Self” gallery with Anna Güntner’s enigmatic Shy Fiancé (1961) and Leonor Fini’s Sphinx (1973), each portraying bare-breasted girls as totems of mystical powers, alongside Vanessa German’s figurative sculpture The Blood & The Animals, The Mirror & The Sky; An Ode to the Un-Language-In a position Reality of Is-Ness (2017), constructed from discovered objects and, in line with the artist, “the blood that binds us all collectively, mild, mild, mild, glee, the glory of creativity, the deep reality that we’re all right here collectively”. This midway mark within the present provided a obligatory uplifting, poetic pause—although this critic does really feel most at residence within the surreal.
The theme of oppression then returns with a bit known as “No Gate, No Lock, No Bolt”, a quote from Virginia Woolf’s well-known essay (and demand for) A Room of One’s Personal. Most of the works are extra a few boudoir of 1’s personal, with Tamara de Lempicka’s The Stunning Rafaela in Inexperienced (round 1927), Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s vulvic “pin-painting” Purple 1 (1986-87) and Jordan Casteel’s oil portrait of the black male nude Aaron (2013), all providing totally different renditions of full-frontal want.
The final two rooms of the exhibition struck me as a form of coda, summing up the place lady is in the present day. “Of Girl Born”, entered by an immersive mural by Karolina Jabłońska titled Weathering the Storm (2025)—the place scraps of feminist quotes blow in a skyscape—uplifts the attention and soul with visceral imagery of goddesses and birthing by the likes of Monica Sjöö, Readability Haynes and Frida Kahlo. And but there’s a reminder that rights received could be taken again, as a reproduction of Madame du Coudray’s 18th-century obstetrical model for practising mock births, and Ewa Kuryluk’s comic-strip like drawing Abortion on TV and Reside (1974), converse to the medicalisation and pathologisation of ladies’s our bodies, in addition to the truth that there may be nonetheless a close to complete ban on abortion in Poland.
In the meantime, “Wartime Ladies” situates gender politics and feminist work throughout the collective reminiscence of the horrors of the 2 world wars, together with the Warsaw Rebellion and the Holocaust, and extra lately the battle in Ukraine. Sharing the area are works by the likes of the Nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat Marie Bashkirtseff; the Soviet Ukrainian artist Tetiana Yablonska; the Soviet dissident Alla Horska, an underground figurehead who was possible murdered by the KGB; and Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, who painted Battle Widow (2023) in Kyiv after the total invasion of Russia in February 2022.
Directly about life and dying, this finale feels pressing for the museum and its position in Warsaw at a time when the Ladies’s Strike motion rally cry for reproductive rights—“I feel, I really feel, I resolve”—is so vital, and battle and genocide so near the nation’s borders. Girl and her proper to an equal and protected and celebrated place within the metropolis stays the positioning of protest, in and out of doors the museum.
• The Girl Query 1550-2025, Museum of Trendy Artwork in Warsaw, Till 3 Could
• Curator: Alison M. Gingeras
• Tickets: 35zł (£7, concessions out there)
