Women in Abstraction: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

Women in Abstraction sets out to write the history of the contributions made by “female artists” to abstraction in the 20th century, through to about the 1980s, with a few original incursions into the 19th century.

The artists are presented here as players and co-creators in their own right, of modernism and its legacy. Far from being a mere catalogue, the idea is to highlight the decisive turning points that marked this history, while simultaneously questioning the canons of abstraction. Special attention is accorded to highlighting the specific contexts surrounding, favoring or, on the contrary, hindering recognition of female artists. These contexts are at once educational, social, institutional, ideological, and even aesthetic. The exhibition thus reveals the process of invisibilization that marked the work of these artists, while still presenting their positions, with all their complexities and paradoxes. Many of these artists adopted a non-gendered identity while others laid claim to a “female” art.