Exhibition News: Biala at Whitechapel

Janice Biala, Yellow Still Life, c.1955, oil on canvas, 162.6 x 129.5 cm. Courtesy The Christian Levett Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022

Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70

9 February – 7 May 2023

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London

★★★★ A ‘kaleidoscopically varied exhibition’ – The Telegraph 
★★★★  ‘You can’t have too much of a good thing, and this show is full of good things’ –  Time Out
‘Bursting with feeling…‘ – Financial Times

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.

Reaching beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionist movement, this exhibition celebrates the practices of the numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War.

It is often said that the Abstract Expressionist movement began in the USA, but this exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing gestural abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts – from the rise of fascism in parts of South America and East Asia to the influence of Communism in Eastern Europe and China.

The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner (1908-1984) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985). More than half of the works have never before been on public display in the UK.