Wook-kyung Choi, Untitled, 1960
(Picture: Wook-kyung Choi Estate and Courtesy of Arte Collectum)In a crowded field, the story often told of post-war abstract painting is arguably the most crudely reductive in art history. The contemporary American painter Amy Sillman expressed it best when she described it in Artforum magazine as “bad politics steel-welded around a chassis of machismo”, where “the paint stroke… is equivalent to a phallic spurt, to [Jackson] Pollock whipping out his dick and pissing in [art dealer] Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace”. Not only is that myth all about men, but American men – nay, New York men.
This exhibition and the book accompanying this exhibition are a welcome riposte; a revisiting of Abstract Expressionism from a feminist and international perspective, with around 150 works by 80 women artists working in abstraction from across the world. Many of them were shown and written about in their lifetimes, only to be denied a presence in the official histories. Others never achieved the level of recognition this and other shows are now beginning to give them.
