Strong Women

Phyllida Barlow (*1944) tests boundaries with her monumental sculptures in an eccentric yet humorous manner, reflecting on the relationship with our environment through her use of industrial and everyday materials. With impressive installation photos and never-before-seen archival material the publication presents Barlow’s unique oeuvre from her early works until the present day.

Shuvinai Ashoona (*1961) is a third-generation Inuit artist based in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada. Best known for her highly personal and imaginative iconography, Shuvinai Ashoona’s imagery ranges from closely observed naturalistic scenes of her Arctic home to monstrous  and fantastical visions.

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories.

Inspired by a private archive and featuring contemporary work by artists who acknowledge the continued relevance of Angela Davis’s experience and politics, the essays, interviews and images in this book provide a compelling and layered narrative of her journey through the junctures of race, gender, economics and politics.

Teresa Margolles abstracts the subject of terror: she extracts the body into abstract forms which are manifest in fired bricks or in mud, water and blood-soaked cloths. They form a memorial to the victims of the Mexican drug wars and the waves of migration.

Yoko Ono is a leading experimental and avant-garde artist. In Tokyo during the 1950s, she introduced original questions about the concept of art and the art object, breaking down the traditional boundaries between branches of art. She has since been associated with conceptual art, performance, Fluxus, and 1960s happenings. Through her performances and activism, she created a new kind of relationship with both spectators and fellow artists – including her late husband, John Lennon – ...

For almost fifty years, Senga Nengudi (b. 1943, USA) has shaped an œuvre that inhabits a specific and unique place between sculpture, dance and performance. Her iconic R.S.V.P sculptures – performative objects made from pantyhose and materials such as sand and stone – have been acquired by important American museums. The publication accompanies the first solo exhibition of Nengudi in Germany at the Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Abstract paintings were being produced even before Kandinsky. Completely independently from each other, Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) in England, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) in Sweden and Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in Switzerland developed an individual, abstract pictorial language. What they had in common was a desire to make visible the laws of nature, the intellect and the supernatural. Their works are being presented side by side for the first time in an exhibition.

Since the 1960s, Joan Jonas (b. 1936 in New York) has been one of the pioneers of performance art. She was part of the New York art scene that included Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, John Cage, Philipp Glass, and Merce Cunningham. Her experimental installations involve projections, video, drawings, ambient sound, props, and masks. Based on a number of interviews, the volume provides insights into her artistic oeuvre.

Barbara Hammer (b. 1939) is an American feminist artist known as a pioneer of queer experimental and documentary film. The monograph accompanies an extensive exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, celebrating the depth and expanse of Hammer's five decades of art making.