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New Worlds / Women to Watch 2024: When women artists envision a different world, how does that look? NMWA invites a close exploration of this question in Women to Watch 2024, the seventh installment of the museum’s exhibition series. It will be the first Women to Watch to be presented in NMWA’s newly renovated exhibition space on the second floor of the museum.

Given the extraordinary events of 2020 and 2021, including a global health pandemic, intense calls for social reform, and unprecedented political division, any contemporary art exhibition planned for three years from this moment will necessarily include work that is impacted by all of these issues. However, rather than focus on recent events as an organizing factor for Women to Watch 2024, we choose instead to look to artists’ visions of a new world. How have our societal conditions impacted artists’ visions for the future or inspired them to create alternative current realities? Whether optimistic or discordant, fantastical or believable, artists have always had a hand in visualizing what could be and, in times of difficulty, have often provided hope––or warning.

Irene Aristizábal, head of curatorial and public practice at BALTIC and co-curator of British Art Show 9, was invited to curate a short list of artists with ties to the UK.

The work of our four shortlisted UK artists (before one is selected to take part in the 2024 exhibition at NMWA) was on view from 4 to 10 February 2023 at Christie’s, 8 King Street. We greatly thank Christie’s for supporting our exhibition and Mezcal Reina for providing drinks for the Vernissage.

Noémie Goudal

Goudal’s practice investigates the complexity of man’s precarious evolving relationship with the natural world, and our quest for an understanding of our place in the universe that stretches from ancient times to modernity. Through the construction of staged sets, and the use of models made of paper, mirrors and wood, Goudal’s oeuvre brings real and imagined geographies into a mysterious synchronicity that gives a new perspective on the issue.

Goudal studied at The Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins.  She is represented by Edel Assanti.  She was featured at the 2022 Les Rencontres d’ Arles.

Alicia Reyes McNamara

Reyes McNamara’s work is an investigation of folklore and rituals around loss, mourning and healing, in which beings and landscapes mutate and shapeshift, creating a personal imaginary of forms of embodiment. Her practice examines the potential of how all things can transcend their own definition and acquire a new life or meaning.

Reyes McNamara studied at The Oxford Ruskin School of Fine Art and the California College of the Arts.  She was featured in the 2022 London Open. Reyes McNamara is represented by Niru Ratnam.

Tai Shani

Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines feminine otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchal narratives.

Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner and a 2019 Max Mara prize nominee. Her work is on show at Gathering (London) and has been shown at Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunst Verein, Austria (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016) and many others.

Alberta Whittle

Whittle works across film, media, performance, and sculpture.  Her work is concerned with questioning how history and society are constructed in the Western world. Her practice takes on the legacies of colonialism and slavery and is also concerned with environmental issues such as the climate crisis.

Whittle is the 2020 winner of the Turner Bursary and Frieze Artist Award.  She is representing Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

UK Friends of Nmwa Women to Watch Producers:
Beth Colocci
Mary Poelzlbauer
Sarah Ritchie

Project Advisor:
Nina Pearlman

Short Listed Artists

Images: www.1000words.co.za and Beth Colocci

The sixth instalment of the exhibition series focuses on the transformation of paper into complex works of art. Paper is a ubiquitous medium that is made from a variety of sources. Each artist’s work exemplifies the diversity and flexibility of art produced from paper.

Our UK exhibition, Paper Work,was held 13-17 September 2019 at Sotheby’s London.

Women to Watch UK: Paper Work featured:

Sophie Bouvier Ausländer

Paper is integral to Bouvier Ausländer’s practice and allows her to interrogate the tangibility of things and how sculpture and painting can change the structure of the world and our perception of it. Often working with strands of shredded maps woven to cover immense surfaces or forms, or fragments of inked tracing paper which take on the sheen of metal, she creates new worlds from worlds already at hand. Paper’s materiality becomes the agent creating her sculptural environments.

Bouvier Ausländer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, CSM and ECAL (Brussels). She is represented by Heinzer Reszler Lausanne, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art London, and Davidson Contemporary NYC. Her most recent solo museum exhibition was at Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle, CH.

Mary Evans

Using brown paper as her main material, Evans’ evocative site-specific installations reflect on the impact of tragic and brutal moments in history. In the tradition of women’s handiwork and tailoring, she cuts out silhouettes, which act as visual signifiers of certain races and nationalities. By visually pigeonholing them, she questions ideas around representation, cultural change and globalisation.

Evans studied at the UAL, Rijksakademie (Amsterdam) and Goldsmiths. She has had solo exhibitions at Tiwani Contemporary and the Baltimore Art Museum among many others. She is represented by Tiwani Contemporary.

Ludovica Gioscia

Gioscia began using paper as a layered and sculptural medium in 2003, entranced by its alchemical qualities and its ability to be both two and three-dimensional simultaneously. She has screen printed her own wallpaper using it as a carrier of patterns, decoration and colour and made it into large torn installations, both sturdy and fragile. She has compressed pulped paper into rock-like forms commenting on the geology of consumption. Her studio is now the Infinite Present where her creations are in flux: past works return to become future works, carrying on their exuberance and originality to their next iteration.

Gioscia studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She is represented by Baert Gallery (Los Angeles) and VITRINE (London/Basel).

Charlotte McGowan-Griffin

From large-scale walk-in installations to more intimate graphic works, McGowan-Griffin uses a combination of techniques to explore space, presence and form: both “cutting out” and “cutting in”, print techniques such as embossing and watermarking, found object, film, sound and performance. Paper has been at the heart of her practice not only as medium but also as subject. Her works have explored the novel (The Whiteness of the Whale), the encyclopaedia (From Sarsaparilla to Sorcery) the account book (Kami no Machi) and the birth of information (The Origin of the World).

McGowan-Griffin studied at Goldsmiths and AFECT. She has received a UNESCO-Aschberg scholarship in 2003 and Pollock-Krasner Award in 2011.

Abigail Reynolds

Reynolds’ artistic work is closely linked to books and libraries, which she uses both as sites of research and as source material. She prizes the different types of book papers both as a register of time, and for their mechanical properties. To create Lost Libraries she travelled by motorbike from China to India across the Silk Road to visit fifteen sites of libraries lost to political conflict, natural catastrophe, revolution and war to create a work that examines the conceptual force of paper lost over time, forever.

Natasha Howes: Curator

Our curator for Paper Work is Natasha Howes. Howes is Senior Curator at Manchester Art Gallery where, with her team, she curated The First Cut: Paper at the Cutting Edge (2012) and numerous solo exhibitions including Martin Parr, Neha Choksi, Joana Vasconcelos, and Xie Nanxing. In 2013 she was seconded to Manchester International Festival for do it involving 160 artists. Howes is involved in purchasing contemporary art for the collection. Recent acquisitions include works by Susan Hiller, Pascale Marthine Tayou and Joana Vasconcelos.

The exhibition Paper Routes — Women to Watch 2020 featuring Mary Evans will be at NMWA from 26 June – 7 September 2020.

Short Listed Artists

The fifth rendition of Women to Watch featured artists investigating the expressive possibilities of metalwork, through a wide variety of techniques, creating works ranging from jewelry to sculpture and conceptual forms.  The exhibition sought to disrupt the stale narrative that metal remains within the purview of men and demonstrated the vibrancy that contemporary female artists bring to the material.

Phillips Auction House hosted our Women to Watch UK: Metal exhibition in November 2017, attracting over 1,000 visitors.  Minimalist sculpture by Rana Begum was selected and shown in Washington’s exhibit: Heavy Metal.

Short Listed Artists

Organic Matters was the fourth installment of Women to Watch, with a broad remit to focus on artists who work with nature as their subject. The connection between women and nature has a long, fraught history, coloured by gendered stereotypes and discriminatory assumptions. The artists featured in both the UK and the Museum shows confronted and expanded upon these concepts, producing works that ranged from the fanciful to the frightening, the realistic to the abstract. The resulting show looked at modern society’s relationship to the environment, using a diverse array of media. UK Friends of NMWA produced a week-long exhibition and panel discussion at Christie’s, London. Polly Morgan, who works with animal taxidermy, was selected to represent the UK in NMWA’s exhibition. The museum now holds a work by Morgan in its permanent collection.

Short Listed Artists

High Fiber was the third installment in NMWA’s biennial exhibition series. This exhibition illuminated the centrality of textiles to contemporary artistic practice. Prior to the 1960s, textiles were consigned to the “low” world of craft, frequently categorized as “women’s work,” and constrained by social dynamics that included race as well as gender. Because of textiles’ potent reference to the domestic sphere, contemporary artists often incorporate fibers to sharpen the visual and emotional impact of their conceptual works. The seven artists or artist collectives featured in High Fiber stitched, wove, knit, crocheted, and wound fabric, felt, yarn, ribbon, wire, and single strands of silk organza into expressive forms that alluded to nature, relationships, and the pleasure of making.

The artists selected from a shortlist of 5 to represent the UK for this exhibition were the collective Prick Your Finger. According to Kathryn Wat, Curator of Contemporary Art at the NMWA, “This group’s technical virtuosity, activist outlook, and collaborative spirit exemplify the inventive work being done by textile-centered artists in the UK. ” We were delighted with this choice and highlighted their participation with a 3 day exhibition from 19-22 September at Riflemaker.

Rachael Matthews of Prick Your Finger attended the opening at the Museum in Washington, DC:

Short Listed Artists

Images: www.1000words.co.za and Beth Colocci

Seeking answers to the ever-circling question: is painting dead, the secondWomen to Watch exhibition displayed innovative figurative work by contemporary female artists.  The show displayed the body in a multitude of variations – from the quickly identifiable, to more abstract depictions. The body provides space for ruminations on the nature of relationships, self-image and even societal trends.

UK Friends produced a week-long exhibition and panel discussion at Christie’s, London. Rose Wylie’s work, Lords and Ladies,was selected for exhibition in Washington.  Wylie recasts the tradition of Western figurative painting, assigning no particular meaning to her images.  She believes in spontaneity in creation, drawing her inspiration from varied sources, including art history and cartoons. Lords and Ladies is now in the Museum’s permanent collection, a gift from the UK Friends of NMWA (read more in What We Support).

Short Listed Artists

UK Friends was one of the original participants in 2008’s inaugural Women to Watch. Photography, since its inception as an art form, has always been an avenue for participation by women. The museum show extended the reach of women in this medium. Photography displayed the work of 11 underrepresented artists.

Elisa Sighicelli is known for her photographs and video installations, based on the concept of using light and motion as subject matter.

Short Listed Artists