Latest news with #femaleArtists
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Echobelly's Sonya Madan says male Britpop stars were always 'supportive and decent'
Echobelly's Sonya Madan says all the male Britpop stars treated her well in the '90s. Lad culture was rife at the time, but the singer and guitarist has insisted she had a "decent experience" as a female in the white male-dominated scene - which included Oasis, Blur and Pulp and Suede - and she didn't feel personally attacked when she was compared to other female-fronted Britpop groups, such as Sleeper and Elastica. She told "I think lots of the male bands were lumped in as well, as you know, white male. Britpop acts as well. "So to tell you the truth, I think it's a bit of a lazy accusation. To a certain extent, there is some merit in it, but I think that there were more women then fronting and being in bands. And um, there are plenty of us. "Tell you the truth I don't think it was an issue. I think people like to think of it as an issue now because it's so terribly trendy to talk about women's rights and it wasn't back then. But at the same time, I don't personally believe in lifting someone up by putting someone else down." Sonya added: "Yeah, and in my experience, the boys in all the bands that I came across were really lovely and supportive and decent. "If there was difficulty, it tended to come from a music press and supposedly intelligent people who should have known better. "But as far as camaraderie with other artists, of male artists, yeah, I had a really decent experience." On' 30th anniversary tour. The group - now comprising Sonya Madanat and Glenn Johansson - achieved a No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart with their second studio album On in 1995, which featured the tracks Great Things and Dark Therapy. Echobelly will celebrate 30 years of On with a tour later this year. Echobelly's On 30th anniversary tour dates : OCTOBER 02nd Manchester – New Century Hall 03rd Leeds – Project House 04th Sheffield – Leadmill 09th Bath – Komedia 10th Coventry – HMV Empire 11th Oxford – O2 Academy 12th Southampton – Engine Rooms 16th London – Electric Ballroom 17th Brighton – Chalk 18th Swansea – Sin City NOVEMBER 05th Newcastle – The Cluny 06th Glasgow – Oran Mor 07th Stoke – Sugarmill 08th Nottingham – The Level
Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Connecting Thin Black Lines review — the invisible women of British art
The Thin Black Line, at the ICA in 1985, was a modest landmark. Curated by the artist Lubaina Himid (who was appointed OBE in 2010 and won the Turner prize in 2017), the exhibition focused on a group of black and Asian British female artists and represented a challenge to their collective invisibility in the art world. As Himid described them, 'eleven of the hundreds of creative black women in Britain', barely acknowledged by the artistic establishment. This new ICA show, again curated by Himid, brings together works made by those same 11 women in the intervening decades, highlighting their connections — the photographers Ingrid Pollard and Brenda Agardappear in Claudette Johnson's imposing painted triptych, for example — and indicating the accuracy of Himid's remark in 1985, 'We are here to stay.' Several of the artists have risen to prominence in recent years. Sonia Boyce represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2022; in the same year Himid was the subject of a big exhibition at Tate Modern and Veronica Ryan won the Turner prize. Johnson was the only painter nominated for it last year; Chila Kumari Burman, whose exuberant neons stealthily explore stereotypes and perspectives of Britishness, has a new large-scale commission at the Imperial War Museum North until the end of August. This ought to feel like a triumph, a victory lap. So why doesn't it? • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews Partly because this show is not big enough. It's true that, taking the main gallery on the ICA's ground floor, it's an improvement on the original 1985 show. That occupied only the corridor (euphemistically described as the 'concourse') that leads from the entrance on The Mall to the bar — much to the chagrin of the artists, who quite reasonably felt they were still being marginalised; the title of the show was a wry nod to this. • Turner prize winner 2024 — Jasleen Kaur's car in a doily is a new low But having seen shows extended into the airy galleries upstairs on Carlton House Terrace, it was still a bit disappointing to find this occupying so bijou a space. I didn't know the work of Jennifer Comrie, whose striking pastel and collage drawings are weird and compelling, and would have liked to see more of it. There's just one sculpture by Ryan, a bit tantalising, a bit lost. Sulter's Zabat series, of nine photographic portraits of black women as muses of the arts from Greek mythology, have power individually, but a bigger selection — there's just one Polyhymnia (Portrait of Dr Ysaye Barnwell) — would be even more impactful. Here we all are, it says, still making work, still complex and exciting, still almost none of us recognised names outside the art world — a frustration acknowledged by Himid in the accompanying guide. But it doesn't have room to say much more than that, to expand our knowledge of these artists beyond reminding us they exist. How much has changed, really? ★★★☆☆ICA, London, Jun 24 to Sep 7, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
The Guardian
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Abstract Erotic review – artworks as beguiling as they are compelling
Pendulous, scuttling, slapstick, sinister and ribald, Abstract Erotic revisits a moment in 1966 when the young American critic and curator Lucy Lippard brought together the work of three women in New York in a larger show of eight artists at the Fischbach Gallery then on Madison Avenue. It was originally titled Eccentric Abstraction, but the eccentrically abstract isn't nearly as sexy as the erotic – yet somehow neither title quite fits the strange and compelling sculptures and little objects, drawings and reliefs by Alice Adams, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois that, even 60 years on, are as alive as ever they were. Eccentric Abstraction was the first exhibition Lippard had ever curated, and was, she said, 'an attempt to blur boundaries, in this case between minimalism and something more sensuous and sensual – that is, in retrospect, something more feminist' – although, at the time, feminism was far from her mind. The exhibition was crucial in the development of the now 88-year-old's thinking and her subsequent activism. Although many of the works here were included in the original show, this is not a thorough restaging, and all the male artists, including the then recently graduated Bruce Nauman, are absent. Eccentric Abstraction is largely remembered for the contributions the three female artists made, for the coherence of their approaches to materiality, form and artistic process, and the ways their work addressed the psychosexual and the human body. There are fewer than 30 sculptures, reliefs and drawings here, occupying two small rooms. But size isn't everything. One of the delights of this exhibition is to do with scale. Only one work is bigger than we are. Others you could put in your pocket or carry in your arms. The works of all three artists sit close to the walls, hang from the walls, dangle on wires in front of them, or sit on shelves in a vitrine, jostling in and out of view, emphasising intimacy and proximity. It is a show of close relations, filled with delicate things and enigmatic things, and things as incomprehensible as they are beguiling. It isn't all about forms directly analogous to body parts, although there are plenty of those. There is instead an unnerving slippage between the skin and the interior, between the whole and the part, just as there is between sculptural form and drawing, between object and image, threat and tenderness, familiarity and otherness. A black shape like a pear or a lightbulb, by Hesse, dangles from the wall on a string that loops around a nail to another object that just touches the pear thing. This object is like a skinny black sausage that narrows at its tip then bulges out again, like a bratwurst giving birth to a cocktail sausage. All the elements are painted with black enamel. Stark and graphic, the arrangement is funny and lewd and very satisfying to look at – reminding me, distantly, of Giacometti's 1930-31 surrealist sculpture Suspended Ball. While movements and idioms come and go, distant debts to surrealism and Freud persist. The unconscious is always with us. A steel cable passes through the holes in a perforated metal plate and gets entangled there. Another rusted steel cable is woven through a metal grid. Their relations are complicated and they ensnare me. These tensile amalgamations were the work of Adams, who first trained as a weaver and previously worked with looms and fibre. There is a direct link between her earlier textile art and these sculptures. Other, later works use chain-link fencing, and yet more lengths of springy, twisty, recalcitrant cable that could only be manipulated with difficulty. Their torsions have lives of their own, and can't be forced to follow paths they don't want to take. Adams's materials told her what could and couldn't be done. Some things twist and coil and are held in dynamic constraint. They have the brevity of a sentence but look as if they could explode. Another work – an interpenetrating conjunction of a chain-link cylinder and a rusted, woven steel cable funnel – conflates the two forms into a conundrum of interior and exterior. A bulging roll of aluminium fencing hangs like a great intestinal tract in mid-air, a huge skeletal drawing in wire, the form dramatically lit and entangled with its own shadow, which is cast on the wall just behind it. If Eccentric Abstraction seems like a long time ago, the ways the artists worked endure, in their approach to materiality, their disregard of neat divisions between abstraction and figuration, and the ways their works not only occupy space but actively inhabit it. This sensibility is still with us. If the ideas are still alive, much of the works Hesse made using hand-poured sheets of latex resin are now extremely difficult to show or to conserve, the material having darkened and become brittle by age exposure to daylight. The same is true of the sculptures Bourgeois made using latex. Several of Bourgeois's sculptures here have darkened and shrivelled, and acquired a feel of the archaeological relic, if not the fossilised. Her latex and cloth Le Regard, a kind of rounded bowl or vessel split open to reveal something (are there teeth in there, is that an eye or a clitoris?) now seems to belong to an archaic past. Perhaps timelessness can only ever be accidental. Bourgeois's art is filled with ambivalent images and forms. Her Fée Couturière is a dangling off-white sac, a little like a wasp's nest penetrated by apertures. It might be a head, it could be a habitation. Even the version of her Fillette, a dangling erect penis and balls, sheathed and swaddled in some kind of blanket, is as much female as it is, just as inescapably, male. Gender in almost all the works here is slippery, when it can be ascribed at all. What a can of worms all this is. On cue, sitting on a shelf behind glass, are two small cylindrical containers by Hesse, one most likely the original lid to the other, both filled to overflowing with little worms, fashioned from cord and wire, everything painted in white enamel. Many of Hesse's works from the mid-1960s can be seen as impromptus or asides, things made in the moment, without much regard to their permanence. Wrapped objects bulge in sagging net bags, like so much shopping. It's as if Hesse made things to see what they would look like, how they would look back at her and tell her what to do next: one thing leading to another, and another. Many of the compound forms Hesse created were made using inflated balloons as a kind of armature, their surfaces built up and solidified using tape and paint. The process is immediate and daft, as basic as breathing. Along with Abstract Erotic, The Courtauld is also showing a room of drawings by Bourgeois. Filled with maelstroms and turbulence, repetitive gestures and breast forms, waves and rows of marks and unnameable, unstoppable eruptions, they are more records of her own emotional weather than any formal search. These drawings often have a great touch, but the sculptures in Abstract Erotic say it all, even when we don't know what it is. Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams at the Courtauld, London, from 20 June to 14 September
Arab News
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Deaf artist breaks barriers with solo debut in Jeddah
JEDDAH: 'It's never too late to follow your dream,' says Elham Abu Talib, who has held her first solo exhibition in Jeddah after 38 years. The Saudi artist is no stranger to the local art scene, having taken part in exhibitions across the Kingdom and overcome the barriers accompanying being severely deaf. And at the Saudi Arabian Society of Culture and Arts in Jeddah on Sunday, Abu Talib showcased more than 40 paintings to leading artists and lovers of the genre. Titled 'Inspiration,' the exhibition marked a milestone, presenting her work to the public while highlighting her artistic journey amid years of persistence. Abu Talib hopes to represent the Kingdom in international competitions. She also hopes the arts society will continue supporting disabled and female artists by providing platforms for their creativity. Her passion began in childhood, when natural talent blossomed into fine art shaped by a beautiful dream. She lost her hearing as a child and faced speech difficulties, but met her challenges with patience, courage, and ambition. Determined to express herself, she used a brush and colors as her voice — turning her childhood dreams into vivid reality. She shared that hearing loss kept her from entering university, but her late father convinced her it did not mean giving up her ambitions. Inspired by his words, she began participating in exhibitions while raising her children and fulfilling her duties as a mother. She believes her disability has sharpened her visual perception — a gift she channels into her art. 'I'm so happy that, after 38 years, my dream has come true with this solo exhibition,' she said. 'I thank the Saudi Arabian Society of Culture and Arts in Jeddah for giving me this opportunity.' Abu Talib hopes to represent the Kingdom in international competitions. She also hopes the arts society will continue supporting disabled and female artists by providing platforms for their creativity. Maha Abdulhalim Radwi, secretary-general of the Radwi Art Prize, said the artist had finally achieved a major milestone, adding: 'This event allowed her to showcase her unique perspective and creative talent to a wider audience, proving that art transcends communication barriers.' Mohammed Al-Subaih, the director general of the SASCA, said Abu Talib had dreamed of a solo exhibition for nearly four decades — and was now finally living that dream. He added: 'She's participated with us in many workshops and group exhibitions; now it's time to celebrate her first solo show. 'She deserves all the support and encouragement.'
New York Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brandee Younger Has a New Secret Weapon: Alice Coltrane's Harp
Brandee Younger has noticed her audience changing lately. The harpist, composer and bandleader, whose elegant, groove-anchored sound has made her a standout presence in and around jazz in recent years, had grown accustomed to seeing a certain type of listener at her shows. 'It's, like, a Portland, 40s man,' she said with a smile during an interview last month at her East Harlem apartment, referencing demographic data on her fan base — not atypical for a contemporary jazz artist — furnished by her label. During recent tours, though, she started to notice an influx of 'young girls that are, like, so excited.' It's been an encouraging sight for Younger, 41, who said that growing up as 'this little Black girl playing harp' and devoting herself to classical studies while also keeping close tabs on hip-hop and R&B, she struggled to find role models. 'I want to grab their hands,' she said of these new converts. 'I want to nurture these 20-year-old girls, because I wish I had that — something like that — when I was 20.' Younger's latest batch of music, out Friday, feels like a nurturing, affirming message too. 'Gadabout Season,' her third album for Impulse!, offers the best encapsulation yet of the tasteful, subtly radical sonic hybrid that she has been honing since she picked up the harp at age 11. It's a persuasive argument for the vast, trans-idiomatic potential of her instrument. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
