Britain Showcases Women in Art
This year Britain's art scene showcases a diverse range of women artists’ exhibitions and installations taking place across the nation. From multi-media installations, breathtaking exhibitions, vivid portraits and sculptures there’s sure to be an art event to engage visitors from across the globe.
Tate St Ives
Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life
Until May 2023
Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) is one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. She was at the forefront of international modern art, deeply spiritual, and passionately engaged with political and technological change. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, she moved to St Ives in 1939, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her works reveal a singular vision of art and life, integrating her interests in music, dance, science, space exploration, politics, and religion, with personal events and experiences.This exhibition presents almost five decades of her sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints and designs. Hepworth considered St Ives her ‘spiritual home’. Her former residence and workspace in the town, Trewyn Studio, is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Elizabeth Price: SLOW DANS
27 January 2023 – 14 May 2023
The Scottish première of SLOW DANS is one of the most ambitious installations to date by Turner Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price. SLOW DANS is a cycle of three 10-screen videos – KOHL, FELT TIP and THE TEACHERS. These three works present a fictional past, parallel present, and imagined future, interweaving compact narratives that explore social and sexual histories and our changing relationship with the material and the digital. Elizabeth Price is an internationally renowned artist with work in collections around the world. In 2012, she was awarded the Turner Prize for her video installation The Woolworths Choir of 1979.
Firstsite, Colchester
BIG WOMEN
11 February - 18 June 2023
Sarah Lucas, one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, who first came to prominence as a leading light in the generation of Young British Artists (YBAs), will curate a major exhibition at Firstsite in 2023 – and it’s going to be very BIG. Under the headline BIG WOMEN, the Colchester gallery will showcase work by leading female artists. The exhibition promises a wealth of diverse artworks to enjoy – and a few surprises too. As part of the exhibition, BIG WOMEN will also include a festival day complete with bands, DJ’s, food and drink.
Barbican Centre, the Art Gallery
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle
16 February - 21 May 2023
The largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century. Alice Neel’s canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalised in society: labour leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, civil rights activists and queer performers. The exhibition is organised jointly with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and will have over 70 of Neel’s most vibrant portraits on display. Neel’s vibrant portraits are shown alongside archival material from the time, including photography, letters and film. Please download the images from Dropbox here.
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism
31 March - 10 September 2023
This is the first major UK exhibition of the trailblazing Impressionist. In partnership with the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, this exhibition will bring together around 30 of Morisot’s most important works from international collections to reveal the artist as a trailblazer of the movement. The exhibition includes over 30 Morisot artworks, plus masterpieces by greats such as Reynolds, Gainsborough and Fragonard drawing on new research and previously unpublished archival material from the Musée Marmottan Monet to trace the roots of her inspiration, revealing the ways in which Morisot engaged with 18th century art and culture, while also highlighting the originality of the artistic vision, which ultimately set her apart from her predecessors.
The Weston Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Lindsey Mendick: Where The Bodies Are Buried
Thu 6 Apr – Sun 3 Sep 2023
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) announces the first UK museum solo exhibition by artist Lindsey Mendick. Lindsey Mendick’s solo exhibition will transform The Weston Gallery at YSP, taking the form of a multi-media installation that investigates dreams, Gothic stories, television and cultural experiences from the 1990s. Bringing the artist's recurring anxiety dream to life, Where The Bodies Are Buried takes the form of a decaying house with dark secrets beneath the floorboards. Works will include ceramics and stained glass emerging from the floor as hands, feet and limbs, with a film playing across several screens creating a chorus for simultaneous viewing. The phrase ‘where the bodies are buried’ means to possess information or secrets about a person or organisation. In Mendick’s installation, the secrets are both literal and metaphorical, the buried bodies signifying her fear of being ‘found out’ and misdeeds of the past being unearthed.
The National Gallery
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden
20 July – 29 October 2023
More than 30 years after Dame Paula Rego (1935–2022), the National Gallery’s first Associate Artist (1990–92), was commissioned to create a painting for the Sainsbury Wing Dining Room, a new exhibition will explore the relationship of Rego’s work titled 'Crivelli’s Garden' to the 15th-century altarpiece that inspired it. The exhibition, which had long been planned to mark this anniversary, will unite the two monumental artworks in the Gallery’s collection for the first time – inviting visitors to draw out direct comparisons – and will also show how members of National Gallery staff found their way into Dame Paula’s work.
Royal Academy of Arts
Marina Abramović
23 September — 10 December 2023
In September 2023 the Royal Academy of Arts will present a solo exhibition of the internationally acclaimed artist Marina Abramović Hon RA. The exhibition will be Abramović’s first major survey in the UK, bringing together over 50 works spanning her entire career, including performance works within the galleries. It will explore how Abramović has reflected on the temporal nature of performance art by extending its impact through its traces: photographs, videos, objects, installations and re-performances of her works by young performers. This exhibition continues the Royal Academy’s strand of programming that has showcased some of the most important living artists
Tate Britain
Sarah Lucas
28 September 2023 – 14 January 2024
Sarah Lucas is one of the leading figures in an outstanding generation of young British artists who emerged during the 1990s, Sarah Lucas has gained an international reputation for provocative works that frequently employ coarse visual puns and a defiant, bawdy humour. Lucas makes sculptures from a heterogeneous and unexpected range of everyday materials, such as worn furniture, clothing, fruit, vegetables, newspapers, cigarettes, cars, resin, plaster, neon lamps and light fittings. The grungy, abject appearance of many of her works belies the serious and complex subject matter they address. Using ordinary objects in unexpected ways, she has consistently challenged people’s understanding of sex, class and gender over the last four decades. See more information and images from the Tate here.
Tate Britain
Women in Revolt
8 November 2023 – 7 April 2024
This exhibition will be the first of its kind – a major survey of work by over 100 women artists working in the UK. Through their creative practices, women’s liberation was forged against the backdrop of extreme social, economic and political change. Women in Revolt! will focus on a hugely diverse range of artists and a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, film and performance. This exhibition will explore and reflect on issues and events such as: the British Women’s Liberation movement, the fight for legal changes impacting women, maternal and domestic experiences, Rock Against Racism and Punk, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of Black and South Asian Women Artists, Section 28 and the AIDs pandemic.
Register on www.assets.visitbritain.org to access available images for art and venues in Britain.