UK Exhibitions by Women

Discover the childhood sketches of Beatrix Potter. As a young girl Beatrix Potter showed keen design skills. This display tracks the development of Potter's artistry by showcasing examples of her childhood sketches and domestic projects alongside her adored, famous illustrations that came later.  

Inspired by the Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I; this exhibition is a new commission from photographer Susan Derges.  Using both analogue and digital techniques the work, titled Mortal Moon, unpacks the Armada Portrait’s symbolism, with a particular focus on the Moon. 

Mr & Mrs Ravilious, is the Gallery's main exhibition for 2019, which will be devoted to the work of Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah Garwood, two artists whose lives were both prematurely cut short. Eric died in 1942, aged 39, while serving as a war artist; Tirzah (née Garwood) died in 1951, aged 42. Despite this, they have a unique place in 20th century art and the exhibition tells the story of their artistic life together, presenting the parallels…

Place, Space and Who is a new artwork by Barbara Walker, created over a four-month residency at Turner Contemporary. It explores identity and belonging, featuring sound and portraits of five women and girls from the African Diaspora living in Margate and Kent.

This exhibition presents the largest solo display of Pearl Alcock’s drawings and paintings to date – all from the Whitworth Collection.  Following the Brixton riots in the early 1980s, trade in the café ceased and Alcock was forced onto the dole. Unable to afford a birthday card for a friend, she made one instead. This simple act sparked an outpouring of creativity that lasted her entire lifetime, as she realised her ‘visions’ and ‘moods’ in the form of drawings and…

Nightjars and Allies, is the fourth solo exhibition by American artist Elizabeth Neel. The exhibition features new paintings on canvas that continue to foreground Neel’s reflections on our surrounding physical landscape well as the inner landscape of the mind. The exhibition takes its name from a new painting, Nightjars and Allies, and is the largest scale at which the artist has worked, as she continues to explore positive and negative interplay in her works by creating a constant illusion between distance…

Grete Marks – also known as Margret Marks or Margarete Heymann – was one of the earliest female students of the Bauhaus School. This exhibition, An Intimate Portrait, celebrates a lesser known aspect of the artist’s creative practice through a series of intimate portrait paintings and drawings from the 1920s and 1930s. Marks is best known for founding the Hael-Werkstätten pottery in Germany – examples of which are included in the exhibition – and later for her ‘Grete Pottery’ created in…

Marie Neurath and her team at the Isotype Institute produced over 80 illustrated children’s books from 1944-1971 in a pioneering collaboration between researchers, artists and writers. Using infographics and illustrated diagrams to explain scientific concepts, Neurath’s books mark a defining moment in information design for children. The exhibition includes spreads and working materials from book series that Marie Neurath produced, including Wonder World of Nature and Wonders of the Modern World.  

An exhibition of the work of Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer , which brings together some 35 works, revealing the diversity of her output, including graphic works, photographs, films and paintings. Spanning more than five decades, the show highlights the playful conceptual approach that she brings to her experiments across all media.

Moyra Davey is always aware of the inevitable end, she constructs a practice conscious of its own past and reliant on radical self-doubt. Her photographs, films, and essays cross-reference and depend on one another as she makes a subject of her own process and its intentions, fears, and failures.

"A Mind For Moonlight", is an exhibition of new work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The exhibition features a new group of paintings, including portraits and figures in landscapes. Her subjects, black men and women, are bold, often confronting the viewer; the works evoke a narrative that is up to the viewer to reconstruct.  

The Ballroom table’s Perspex box has been transformed by Candace Bahouth into a creative hot house - Box of Delights!  A riot of colour, pattern and mosaic, Candace takes the ordinary and reimagines it to create bizarre, surreal and fanciful objects.

In the nineteenth century, long before the current era of fake news, Emily Dickinson wrote a meditation on truth in her poem Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant. With a title alluding to the poem, this exhibition, Telling it Slant, of Julie Cockburn’s latest work similarly excavates authentic stories by circuitous means. Using a rich material language, Cockburn embarks on a visual journey to delicately reveal narrative histories and layered meanings in lost and discarded images. Cockburn partially obscures the images in a…

Mona Hatoum’s work reflects on subjects that arise from our current global condition, including systems of confinement, the architecture of surveillance and themes of mobility and conflict. Channelling the poetic charge and metaphoric resonance of a wide range of materials from steel, brick and concrete, to rubble, glass and human hair, in this exhibition, Remains to be Seen, she explores the elemental forms of the grid and the sphere, drawing on both the geometric rigour of Minimalist sculpture and the possibilities…

This exhibition by Harmony Hammond. features early and recent works, ranging in date from 1971 to 2019. As artist, curator, author and activist, Hammond was a pivotal figure in the feminist art movement in New York during the 1970s.  Her early work combined gender politics with both a minimal and post-minimal understanding of materials and process, a focus that continues to this day.  

This show celebrates the humanity and enduring impact of one of the most influential 20th-century printmakers – Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). Notable for the emotional power of her drawing, printmaking and sculpture, the display explores the printed works of the socially-minded German artist through self-portraits and images of the poor and dispossessed.  

A fascinating selection from Lessing’s extensive personal archive, is displayed for the first time, giving unprecedented insight into Doris Lessing’s life. The exhibition uses visual art and objects, alongside private correspondence and working papers, to explore the unfamiliar or forgotten aspects of Lessing’s life as well as iconic works that shaped her legacy.  This exhibition offers an unprecedented, intimate look into the remarkable life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.