Material Girls and their Muses: VITRINE Fitzrovia, London

 

VITRINE, Fitzrovia proudly presents Material Girls and their Muses, a group exhibition featuring the work of five female-identifying sculptors with material-led practices alongside their chosen muses. This exhibition, curated by Marcelle Joseph, is a restaging of an exhibition Joseph initially curated in 2014 in a disused space in the diamond district of London’s Hatton Garden. Appropriating Madonna’s 1984 theme song in the title, this exhibition interrogates both gender and the meaning of the muse. Muses throughout art history have been characterized as passive, powerless female models at the beck and call of a dominant, influential older male artist. This exhibition turns that romanticised definition of an artist and his muse on its heads: all featured artists identify as female, femme or non-binary, and the exhibition goes back to the ancient Greek origins of the word ‘muse’ when muses were far removed from being submissive feminine objects of desire. In Greek mythology, the Nine Muses were in fact brilliant, accomplished goddesses of the arts, humanities and sciences. These muses had their own agency to influence others. And in this exhibition, the chosen muses – all artists in their own right - serve as active, powerful agents of inspiration for the five featured artists from a younger generation. 

 

In the first pairing, London-based Spanish artist Saelia Aparicio chose the late Danish self-taught artist Ovartaci (1894 - 1985) as her muse. Like Ovartaci, Aparicio creates fictional worlds that exist in a liminal space between fiction and reality, human and post-human, presenting hybrid bodies that are both terrifying and brimming with humour, inviting the viewer to journey where other rules apply.  Ovartaci was an artist whose art and life broke with societal expectations and norms. Over the course of 56 years living in a psychiatric hospital in a small city in Denmark, the house painter born Louis Marcussen and assigned male at birth reincarnated themself anew as the female artist named Ovartaci, which loosely translates as ‘Chief Lunatic’. During this period, Ovartaci created drawings, paintings and sculptures that feature their signature chimerical world of slim, elongated alien women and animal figures, melding species together into mythical and majestic creatures. Aparicio is a creator of speculative universes too, employing the tools of sculpture and drawing and a myriad of materials and processes, such as mouth blown glass, ceramics and found objects, to shape these ecosystems fuelled by the artist’s imagination. Both artists draw on classical mythology and ancient cultures as inspiration. In Ovartaci’s double-sided painting, signed with one of their many aliases, a cat-woman among the various reptilian figures shares a likeness with Sehkmet, the Egyptian goddess of both war and healing who could avert plague and cure disease for her friends. The institutionalized Ovartaci no doubt was very intrigued by this patron of physicians and healers. The hybrid bodies created by both Aparicio and Ovartaci could be described as mutant or Other, but these characters come to life in their own fantastical worlds and perhaps offer the possibility of the transcendence of their souls, a belief that was central to Ancient Egyptian society.

 

London-based Italian artist Ludovica Gioscia (b. 1977) looked across the Atlantic for her agent of divine inspiration - the New York-based American artist Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955). Their respective multidisciplinary artistic practices share many formal qualities, namely their vibrant colour palette and use of pattern. Raised in Rome in the eighties, Gioscia was moulded by the layering of the Baroque and the Memphis Design movement in Italy at that time. Apfelbaum instead grew up in Pennsylvania and studied fine art there and in New York, moving to New York City after art school in 1978. There, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art, Apfelbaum created her own unique style of working that incorporates an energy, playfulness and wit alongside her feminist outlook and love of popular culture. Both artists make two-dimensional and three-dimensional works that incorporate textiles, clay, found objects and other tactile elements traditionally associated with craft and domesticity. In this exhibition, the viewer experiences the ceramic work of Apfelbaum and the textile work of Gioscia with all its extravagant colour and hallucinatory pattern as a materially rich and textured ride around the colour wheel, but underneath it all, a painterly experimentation in three dimensions. Gioscia weaves her lived experience, love of process, historical influences and dream analysis into her wearable textile Lab Coat sculpture and the hanging textile work that is part of her Portal series. Apfelbaum meanwhile channels memories from her youth growing up in Pennsylvania surrounded by the repeated patterns and motifs of quilts and barn decorations as well as the tradition of Pennsylvania German terracotta. The wavy and star-studded ceramic and textile works in this exhibition celebrate these artists’ mutual love of materiality, design, colour and pattern. 

 

New York-based Brazilian-American artist Sacha Ingber (b. 1987) selected the late Swiss artist Heidi Bucher(1926-1993) as her Calliope. Both artists are known for their references to the architectonic reality of the body through an ingenious exploration of materiality, domesticity and memory. Whereas Bucher pursued a distinct approach to sculpture that fused performance with her exploration of fashion, textiles, domesticity and architecture, Ingber is more influenced by Pop and post-modern design as well as her lived experience growing up between Brazil and America. Ingber combines found objects with traditional techniques of craft, mould-making and trompe-l’oeil, while Bucher embalms bodies, women’s garments and the built environment in latex-soaked gauze, exhibiting these skins with all of their visceral crevices, fossil-like memories and embedded trauma. Both artists focus on architecture and the body as a way to examine psychologically inhabited interior and exterior spaces. In this show, Ingber’s work on display is a hybrid body of sorts, intimated through women’s clothing on a wooden limbed frame, that transforms into a log cabin in the viewer’s imagination, hinting at how visual languages and aesthetic choices can take on attitudes of rebellion, exuberance and humour. 

 

As a British-Singaporean artist who questions the much maligned category of the ornamental in her practice, Hannah Lim (b. 1998) has singled-out Japanese artist Mariko Mori (b. 1967) as her muse. This pairing features two artists with East Asian origins that make provocative multidisciplinary work that critically examines their respective culture’s past and present aesthetic influences as a way of pushing against fixed notions of gender and race and envisioning a new future. In Mori’s very first video Miko No Inori (Prayer of the Priestess) made in 1996 and featured in this exhibition, Mori uses fashion, pop culture and science fiction as aesthetic templates. Using these motifs, Mori melds Eastern and Western forms to weave a visual narrative about the limiting, stereotypical roles available to Japanese women in this high-gloss digital dreamscape, while also acknowledging the growing creative role of technology. Lim examines her own mixed cultural background in her work that mines Orientalism, the colonial romanticisation of the East. Lim makes richly-hued, anthropomorphic sculptures and intricate drawings that often take the form of eighteenth-century Chinoiserie, such as snuff bottles and drawings of ancient Chinese and medieval bestiaries. Through the production of these decorative artistic objects, Lim seeks to reclaim and reimagine a dialogue between East and West, while examining the complex configurations of power and identity conferred throughout history by the portrayal of East and South East Asian femininity as inherently ornamental. In Lim’s words, she ‘resonate[s] with Mori’s reference to traditional Japanese aesthetics and imagery, reimagined in the form of futuristic characters and environments. This imagery within Mori’s work feels slightly reminiscent of the colourful and often playful reimaging of traditional Chinese designs within my own practice’.

 

The central protagonists in the two featured works by British artist Cathie Pilkington (b. 1968, UK) and her muse British artist Marion Adnams (b. 1898, UK, d. 1995, UK), who both hail from the North of England, echo in form but not species or medium. The first is a near life-sized patinated bronze sculpture of a young girl standing on her tip toes with a cool 60’s vibe given her pixie haircut and mod garb. The second is a painting of a many-limbed totemic piece of driftwood, standing as if posing for a portrait at the top of a hill on a moonlit night overlooking an epic landscape of snow-covered mountains. Pilkington imagines Twinkle (2014) ‘as a kind of pre-pubescent psychopomp – a conductor of spirits – a girl-shaped object caught up in her painted bronze unconscious’. Adnams’s anthropomorphic wood root depicted in oil paint is another sort of material transformation, coming alive under the moonlit sky. Breathing human life into wood is no mean feat but Adnams was well known for her surrealist dreamscapes inspired by the close observation of objects from nature or her beloved local Derby Museum. Adnams wrote in her diary, 

 

‘I am attracted to things which create an atmosphere or period of time, such as skulls, shells and objects from the natural world, and it is always their form which fascinates me as though I were a sculptor. My unusually vivid imagination causes things to become active in my mind and when I begin to paint “seriously” I am always drawn to some particular thing which I paint out of its proper setting and my original subject is relegated to the background.’

Although these two artists do not share a common medium, they do both explore the material transformation of observed objects, breathing life into sculptural materials. Upon closer observation, Twinkle’s patterned tights made from patinated bronze become a gauzy textured polyester before your very eyes, tempting the viewer to pick up and play with this 250 kg figurine as if it was one of the artist’s cheap 1950’s fabric dolls she was collecting at the time this work was made.

 

The title of this show may contain the word ‘girls’ and ‘muses’, but these ten artists, regardless of their gender, use materiality, whether it be expressed through bronze, clay, paper, jesmonite, wood, fabric, latex, found objects or their own body, to tell stories powered by their female/femme lived experience. As Aindrea Emelife wrote in her text for the original exhibition in 2014, ‘If these artists were in the pulpit, their muses in the choir, I would totes be at church every Sunday morning’.

 

NOTES TO EDITORS

 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

 

Marion Adnams (b. 1898, UK; d. 1995, UK) was born in Derby and lived and worked there for most of her life. She remains a little-known figure, never joining any of the British Surrealist groups, rarely featuring in the press, and exhibiting mainly in the Midlands. She trained as a modern languages teacher but in the 1930s took evening classes at Derby School of Art where she was taught by Alfred Bladen, a Derby artist who shared her interest in Surrealism. In 1938, Adnams became an art teacher at Homelands Grammar School for Girls in Derby, and in 1946, she was appointed senior lecturer and head of the art department at Derby Training College. From the end of the 1930s, she started painting in a Surrealist style, putting apparently unrelated objects together in mysterious scenes, and rarely if ever including figures. For about 30 years, Adnams showed continuously in London and the provinces and had a retrospective exhibition at Midland Group Gallery in 1971. Public collections in Manchester, Salford, Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and Wolverhampton hold examples of her works. Adnams stopped painting around 1968 due to deteriorating eyesight.

 

Saelia Aparicio (b. 1982, Spain) is a London-based Spanish artist who completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2015. In 2019, Aparicio won Generaciones 2019 and was commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery to make the film ‘Green Shoots’ for their General Ecology symposium and research project in London. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include those at FUMI, London, UK (2022); The Ryder, Madrid, Spain (2021); TJ Boulting, London, UK (duo with Paloma Proudfoot) (2021); La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain (2019); Sarabande Foundation, London, UK (2018); The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2017); and TURF Projects, London, UK (2017). Group shows include: ‘ Liquid Intelligences’, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid, Spain (2023); ‘Trickster Figures’, Milton Keynes Gallery, UK (2023); ‘Digesting the Past, Processing the Future’, Padr El Jundi, Madrid, Spain (2023); ‘Collective Healing’, Metro Han, Istanbul, Turkey (2023), ‘Testament’, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); ‘Now I am a lake’, Public Gallery, London (20220; ‘A New Figuration’, Friedman Benda, New York (2022); ‘Survey 2’, travelling exhibition at Jerwood Space, London, UK and G39, Cardiff, UK (2021) and Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK (2022); ‘Dancing at the Edge of the World’, Z20 Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome (2020); ‘Retour Sur Mulholland Drive’, La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, and The ICA, London, UK (2016), and ‘A Mysterical Day’, Serpentine Gallery public programme, London (2016). Aparicio has undertaken the following residencies: FIBRA Platform, Mexico (2019); The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK (2019); New Contemporaries Studio Bursary with Sarabande: The Lee Alexander Mcqueen Foundation, London, UK (2017); Sema Nanji Residency, Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea (2016); Salzamt Aterlierhaus, Linz, Austria (2014); and Joan Miró Foundation, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2012).

 

Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955, USA) is an American artist based in New York. Selected recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include those at Mitchell Art Museum, St John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, USA (2024); Frith Street Gallery, London, UK (2023, 2017 and 2014); Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA (2023); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2022); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2018); Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria (2018); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, USA (2017); and 56 Henry, New York, NY, USA (2015). Recent selected group exhibitions include: ’13 Women: Variation II’, Orange County Art Museum, Costa Mesa, California, USA (2023); ‘Imaginary Friends’, Juan Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (2023); ‘Parliament of Plants II’, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2023); ‘Fun Feminism’, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland (2022); ‘The Flames: The Age of Ceramics’, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France (2021); ‘Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection’, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, USA (2020); ‘Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design’, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA, USA (2019); ‘Painter’s Reply: Experimental Painting in the 1970s and Now’, Lisson Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2019); ‘Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise’, mumok, Vienna, Austria (2019); ‘An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (2017); ‘An Irruption of the Rainbow: Color in 20^th Century Art’, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2016); ‘Routes of Influences, Critical Gestures’, Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL, USA (2016); ‘Making and Unmaking’ (curated by Duro Olowu), Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2016); and ‘Found’ (curated by Cornelia Parker), The Foundling Museum, London, UK (2016). In 2021, Apfelbaum was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Her work has been acquired by public collections around the world. Apfelbaum is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London.

 

Heidi Bucher (b. 1926, Switzerland, d. 1993, Switzerland) was a Swiss artist who attended the School of Applied Arts in Zurich from 1942 to 1946, specialising in fashion design. After a spell in New York in the 1950s, she spent the 1960s in Switzerland. She returned to the United States in the 1970’s, this time to California where she made her first mature work, ‘Body Shells, Venice Beach’, in 1972. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, she returned to her native land, devoting her practice to her innovative use of latex and her exploration of the physical boundaries between the body and its surroundings. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized since her death at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland (2022); Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2021); Parasol Unit, London, United Kingdom (2018); Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2014); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, France (2013); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2004); Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Warth-Weiningen, Switzerland (1993); among others. Her work was included in the 57^th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy in 2017. Bucher’s work is featured in numerous international collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate, London, United Kingdom, among others. She is represented by The Approach, London and Lehmann Maupin.

 

Ludovica Gioscia (b. 1977, Italy) is an Italian artist based in London. She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London, UK (2000) and an MFA in Fine Art Media from Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2004). Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Fluor, Exibart, Exit Express, Flash Art International, Kunstforum, Etapes International, Elephant, The End and AN. Her work is included in ‘100 Sculptors of Tomorrow’, published by Thames and Hudson in 2019. She has exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including: CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium; Museo della Figurina, Fondazione Modena Art Visivie, Modena, Italy; Palazzo da Mosto, Fondazione Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Fondazione MACC, Calasetta, Italy; MACRO, Palazzo Fiano, and the American Academy in Rome, Italy; FuturDome, Milan, Italy; The Warhol Foundation, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; La Fabbrica del Cioccolato, Blenio, Switzerland; Creative Centre Osaka, Osaka, Japan; VITRINE, Basel, Switzerland, Fitzrovia and Bermondsey, UK; Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Salon 94, The Flag Art Foundation, and Allegra LaViola in New York, NY, USA; The Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain; Jerwood Space, South London Gallery, and Sotheby’s in London, UK; MNAC, Bucharest, Romania; Comfort Moderne, Poitiers, France; Kino International, Berlin, Germany; Edinburgh College of Arts, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK; and Maraya Art Park, Sharjah, UAE.

 

Sacha Ingber (b. 1987, Brazil) is a Brazilian-American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA. She holds an BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Vassar College, New York, USA and an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA (2013). Ingber has exhibited extensively in the Americas, with solo shows at Rachel Uffner, New York, NY, USA; Brennan & Griffin, New York, NY, USA; The Sunroom, Richmond, VA, USA; and Triumph Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, USA; Hesse Flatow, New York, NY, USA; Marcia Wood, Atlanta, GA, USA; PEANA, Monterrey, Mexico; LVL3, Chicago, IL, USA; Motel, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Coustof Waxman, New York, NY, USA; John Slade Gallery, New Haven, CT, USA; Barbara Walters Gallery, New York, NY, USA; Mom's Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Timeshare Duplex, New York, NY, USA; Hometown Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Spring Break Art Show 4 Times Square, New York, NY, USA; FAB Building, Richmond, VA, USA; Kunstraum, Brooklyn, NY, USA; and Essex Flowers, New York, NY, USA. She had her first European solo show at VITRINE Fitzrovia, London, UK in May 2022.

 

Hannah Lim (b. 1998, UK) is a London-based artist of Singaporean and British heritage working between sculpture, installation and drawing. She studied Sculpture at the University of Edinburgh before going on to complete her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. She has exhibited widely across the UK, including solo shows at Wilder Gallery, London (2023); BeAdvisors, London (2023); Huxley Parlour, London (2022); Commonage Projects, London (2022), and Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh (2022). She has also exhibited in several group exhibitions, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries at South London Galleries, London (2022). She is the recipient of multiple awards, such as the Hospitalfield Residency (2021), the Home Residency by Ronan Mckenzie, and Cob Gallery (2021). Lim is currently Pangolin London’s 2022-2023 Artist in Residence. She was recently commissioned by Tate Collective to create a sculpture in the style of her ‘Snuff Bottle Series’ for Women’s History Month.

 

Mariko Mori (b. 1967, Japan) is an internationally acclaimed artist based between New York and Tokyo. Mori’s solo exhibitions have been exhibited throughout the world, including the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Japan Society, New York, NY, USA; Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA. Several renowned museums have presented Mori’s solo exhibitions, as well as acquired Mori’s works in their collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Prada Foundation, Milan, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Other museum collections that have acquired Mori’s work include: PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine; ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Mori has received various awards, including the prestigious Menzione d’onore at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 (for ‘Nirvana’) and the 8th Annual Award as a promising Artist and Scholar in the Field of Contemporary Japanese Art in 2001 from Japan Cultural Arts Foundation.

 

Ovartaci was the artistic name of the Danish visual artist Louis Marcussen (1894 – 1985) who was assigned male at birth but lived as both a man and a woman during their lifetime. Ovartaci apprenticed as a house painter and decorator before emigrating to Argentina in 1923. They travelled the country for six years before returning home in a frayed state. Upon their return, Ovartaci’s family admitted them to the psychiatric hospital in Risskov, where they lived and worked for the next 56 years. The artist took the name ‘Ovartaci’ – translated loosely as ‘Chief Lunatic’. Over several years, Ovartaci made repeated requests for a sex change surgery and even attempted to hack off their male member themself. Finally, in 1957, the hospital facilitated their female gender affirmation surgery. In 1975, Ovartaci decided not to identify as a woman and started identifying as a man until the artist’s death in 1985. In 1979, the artist was invited to contribute to the exhibition ‘Outsiders’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. In 1980, the artist’s works were featured in a solo exhibition in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2018, an expansive exhibition entitled ‘Ovartaci and the Art of Madness’ included a survey of the artist's work, as well as homages and related works by contemporary artists. Ovartaci’s art can be seen at Museum Ovartaci in Aarhus, Denmark, a museum named after the artist showcasing artwork created at the psychiatric hospital in Risskov, Denmark. In 2022, a monograph on Ovartaci's life, work and production was released: Ovartaci: The Signature of Madness, and their work featured in the Venice Biennale in the Central Pavilion in ‘The Milk of Dreams’ curated by Cecilia Alemani. Please note that the Museum Ovartaci AARHUS/DK refers to Ovartaci using the pronouns he/him but does not disregard other approaches. 

 

Cathie Pilkington (b. 1968, UK) is a London-based artist who studied at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (1986-91) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (1995-97). She was elected a Royal Academician in 2014 and became the first female professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools in London, UK (2016-2019). In 2020, she was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools. Her work is held in the collections of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland; Ömer Koç Collection, Istanbul, Turkey; and the Roberts Institute of Art, London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Weird Horses’ Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2023); ‘Estin Thalassa’, Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2021); ‘The Covering’, Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2019); ‘Working from Home’, Pallant House Gallery, Chicester, UK (2019) and ‘Life Room: Working from Home’, Dorich House Museum, Kingston, UK (2018); ‘Doll for Petra’, Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, Ditchling, UK (2017); ‘Anatomy of a Doll’, Royal Academy Schools Life Room, London, UK (2017); ‘Life Room’, Brighton University Galleries, Brighton Festival, Brighton, UK (2017); and ‘The Value of the Paw’, V&A Museum of Childhood, London, UK (2012). Recent site-responsive interventions include: ‘The Ancestors’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2020); and ‘The Covering: Cathie Pilkington, Pierre Molinier and Morton Bartlett’, Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2020).

 

CURATOR BIOGRAPHY

Marcelle Joseph (b. 1966, United States) is an independent curator and collector based in the United Kingdom. In 2011, Joseph founded Marcelle Joseph Projects, a nomadic curatorial platform that has produced over 45 exhibitions in the UK and the rest of Europe, featuring the work of over 300 international artists. Joseph holds an MA in Art History with Distinction from Birkbeck, University of London with a specialization in feminist art practice. Her curatorial work focuses on gender and the performative construction of identity with an emphasis on material-led artistic practices. Joseph is the executive editor of Korean Art: The Power of Now(Thames & Hudson, 2013). Additionally, Joseph is the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of Mimosa House, London. She is also an Ambassador of the Royal Academy Schools, London, and a member of the Selection Panel of PLOP Residency, London. She served as a trustee of Matt's Gallery in London from 2018-2022 and served on the jury of the 2017-2019 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti, and the Mother Art Prize 2018. She also collects artworks by female-identifying artists under the collecting partnership, GIRLPOWER Collection, as well as more generally as part of the Marcelle Joseph Collection. Since 2022, her collection was been on public display in the UK in two institutional exhibitions co-curated by Joseph, the first  at the Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Rugby (2022) and the second at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, Leeds (2023-24). In 2022, Joseph also co-curated her first museum exhibition in the United States at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles titled ‘The Condition of Being Addressable’. In 2023, she co-founded the GIRLPOWER Residency in southwestern France, an annual artist residency for female-identifying and non-binary artists.