Francesca Woodman
Victoria Miro Gallery
17 November 2010 - 22 January 2011
"Victoria Miro will present a selection of some fifty photographs taken from this extensive overview of the artist's career that comprises of an archive of around 800 photographs created between the early 1970s to 1981. The exhibition will include previously unseen works, including some rare colour prints, alongside photographs from Boulder, Colorado; Providence, Rhode Island; Rome; MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire and New York"
From Victoria Miro Website:
"Francesca
Woodman made her first photographic works at the early age of thirteen and from
the beginning her body was both the subject and object in her work, showing it
in various stages of transformation, deformation, alteration and
effacement. The very first photograph taken by Woodman, Self-portrait
at Thirteen (1972), shows the artist sitting at the end of a sofa in an
un-indentified space, wearing a oversized jumper and jeans, arm loosely hanging
on the armrest, her face obscured by a curtain of hair and the foreground
blurred by sudden movement, one hand holding a cable linked to the camera. In
this first image the main characteristics at the core of Woodman's short career
are clearly visible, her focus on the relationship with her body as both the
object of the gaze and the acting subject behind the camera.
The
body of the artist is often absorbed by the plaster on the walls or wallpaper,
hiding behind furniture and stray objects, playing with its own shadow, hanging
from doors and windows. Often nude apart from variety of props covering her
body, the artist is frequently postioned in empty or sparsely furnished
environments, characterised by rough surfaces, cracked mirrors and old, worn
out furniture. As in the self-portrait at thirteen, various photographs
demonstrate the absence of the face, if not covered by hair or objects, cut by
the framing, hidden by masks or made invisible by turn or twist of the neck or
bust. In other images Woodman appears almost like a shadow, blurred and out of
focus as from the works from Space2 series in which she appears in an
empty room with nothing else except for her moving body. In rare coloured
photographs from the end of her career in New York, Woodman is seen in a softly
hued space, appearing in a mirrored reflection, or clinging on to a doorframe,
her face again hidden by her hair. Despite the similarity in subject matter and
composition, these works present a contrast to the black and white images so
associated with the artist's work.
Photographic
strategies used by Woodman along with the exploration of the photographic media
itself distances her work from those of her contemporaries she has often been
linked with - Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin or Ana Mendieta - for whom the
photograph was more of a documentary imprint of their actions rather than an
artwork in itself. Whilst revealing interest in the process and an
exploration of identity and subjectivity and with signs of performativity, with
seriality and repetition, the scenes enacted by Woodman seem pre-conceived for
the camera. Despite the kind of practice that argues a kind of a disappearance
at its very core, Woodman as the acting subject - the producer of meaning - is
inarguably present.
Biography
Up
until her untimely death in 1981, aged just 22, Francesca Woodman produced an
extraordinary body of work acclaimed for its singularity of style and range of
innovative techniques. Woodman studied at Rhode Island School of Design, from
1975 to 1979, receiving a grant to spend a year in Rome to continue her studies.
Whilst there she produced an extensive body of work and had her first solo
exhibition at a bookshop and gallery specializing in Surrealism and Futurism.
Since 1986, Woodman's work has been exhibited widely and has been the subject
of extensive critical study in the United States and Europe. Large solo
presentations of Woodman's work include an exhibition curated by the Fondation
Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris in 1998 touring to venues including
Kunsthall, Rotterdam; The Photographers Gallery, London and Douglas Hyde
Gallery, Ireland. Woodman's work has featured in many international group
exhibitions and is represented in collections including The Metropolitan Museum
of Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA; Detroit Institute of Arts and
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. Francesca Woodman will have a large
retrospective at SF MoMA, San Francisco in 2011, travelling to Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2012.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 192 page catalogue with essays by Isabel Tejeda, Marco Pierini, Rossella Caruso and Lorenzo Fusi, published by Silvana Editoriale Spa. Price £35.00"