#DepictingWomen

Images of women in art

beauty, goddess, motherhood, bathing, soliciting, fulfilling and fragment are long-standing motifs in the visual representation of women. What is our take on these portrayals of women? 

At the beginning of this year, Manchester Art Gallery publicly removed from display a pre-Raphaelite painting depicting nude nymphs. The global media reaction and ensuing conversations proved that the #MeToo movement had well and truly hit the art world. Be they centuries-old or contemporary, artworks are now being viewed with a critical eye, sparking discussions in public and private that are often heated and polemical. At the heart of the debate lies the relationship between sex and power, the definition of men’s and women’s roles, conservative ideologies and feminist ideals - how each gender relates to the other.

Our exhibition also engages with this debate. The hashtag in the title is a reference to the #MeToo movement; at its core, the topic is far from new. Even the ancient world, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, offers the tale of the Cypriot sculptor, Pygmalion. The artist carved a sculpture in which he unwittingly formed his female ideal. Every day, he caressed his statue and fell in love with it. Submitting to the force of his desire, Venus, the goddess of love and eroticism, brought his artwork to life. Pygmalion gave form to his vision of the female ideal, just as many male artists would later create their dream women and fantasy scenarios. This male gaze of desire formed a pictoral tradition of beauties, of prostitutes and lovers, of goddesses and mothers, and of women who no longer exist as whole bodies, but are instead reduced to the individual body parts deemed important by men. This is evidenced in many works in the exhibition, which traces a line from the sixteenth century to the present day.              

This male gaze on the female subject does not, however, go without comment in the exhibition #DepictingWomen. Each thematic group is accompanied by a work by a female artist, whose work queries the terrain. There are also a number of critical takes by male artists shown alongside. Particular emphasis is placed on artworks conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, when conservative ideologies were being challenged and the feminist movement was coalescing.

By juxtaposing traditional representations of the female form with more recent works that use irony, humour, and criticism to reflect upon outdated ideas about gender roles, the exhibition both encourages viewers to examine their own stance and raises further questions: How does the female gaze view a female motif? Can I tell from looking at a work of art whether the artist was male or female? Does a specifically female gaze even exist?

Moreover: How do men and women define themselves? Is there a natural dual order that determines how a person thinks? Or are these roles entirely constructed by society that human beings are socialized (to a greater or lesser extent) to fit? Though poles apart, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir were convinced by this theory. But what do we see in the works of art? The exhibition #DepictingWomen asks questions about the images of women conveyed in art.

Almost all of the nearly ninety works on display are drawn from the ahlers collection, together with a small number of loans. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that can be purchased at the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation.