UK Exhibitions by Women

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…

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.

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.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami left her homeland (Zimbabwe) at the age of nine amidst political turmoil. Drawing on personal experiences of geographical dislocation and displacement, her intensely pigmented paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources such as online images and haunting family photographs, which collapse past and present into bold afro-futuristic visions.  

From Where I Stand is the first UK museum show of artist Otobong Nkanga, whose practice spans tapestry, drawing, photography, installation, video and performance. The exhibition explores the politics of land and its relationship to the body, and histories of land acquisition and ownership. It features new works created especially for the Tate St Ives exhibition, including a wall painting and sculpture, alongside well known works plus several paintings and photographs, which will be shown publicly for the first time.

Peggy Guggenheim and London, is intended as an anniversary celebration of Guggenheim as one of the first female gallerists in London and showcases her parallel collecting interests in Abstraction and Surrealism through a display of works by Jean (Hans) Arp and Yves Tanguy.

With simple materials like clay, paper and ink Anna Maria Maiolino constructs a fascinating world rooted in human conditions such as longing, fragility and resistance. In this first retrospective in the UK, which spans six decades of work, her oeuvre, Making Love Revolutionary gives form to her experience of exile, deprivation and survival under authoritarian and patriarchal regimes.  

‘Tomaso Binga’ is the artistic pseudonym of Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, which was adopted by the artist in the early 1970s. Working with poetry, writing, performance, collage and painting, Binga dissects and challenges the gendered nature of language – exposing patriarchy encrypted within its very structure. The paradoxical act of appropriating a masculine name allowed the artist to question and parody male prerogatives in society.

In celebration of fifty years of the Zandra Rhodes’ label, the Fashion and Textile Museum presents Zandra Rhodes: 50 Years of Fabulous. This retrospective will highlight more than 50 key looks, as well as 30 original textiles. This comprehensive exhibition will explore five decades of the distinguished career of a British design legend.  

Renee So’s exhibition is comprised of an entirely new body of work. It includes hand-woven textiles, furniture, and ceramic works that refer to representations of the female figure in prehistoric cultures.  

Fons Americanus is a 13-metre tall working fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. Rather than a celebration of the British Empire, Kara Walker’s fountain explores the interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe. She uses water as a key theme, referring to the transatlantic slave trade and the ambitions, fates and tragedies of people from these three continents. Fantasy, fact and fiction meet at an epic scale

Elizabeth Peyton's Aire and Angels, explores the development of Peyton’s unique art from the 1990s to the present day.  She is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists and is internationally renowned.  Her work has been at the forefront of a re-evaluation of figurative art and the tradition of portrait painting since the 1990s. The exhibition includes a selection of key portraits from the first two decades of her career, and investigate the new direction in her work over the last 10…

Mary Sibande presents a series of photographic and sculptural works exploring the power of imagination and constructive anger in shaping identities and personal narratives in a post-colonial world. I Came Apart at the Seams follows the transformative journey of Sibande’s avatar, Sophie. Taking form as a series of colourful human-scale sculptures modelled on Sibande herself, Sophie transgresses from her humble beginnings as a domestic housemaid into myriad empowered characters, transcending racial bias and marginalisation.  

This Centenary exhibition 1919 – 1999 traces Prunella Clough’s work from her early figurative depictions of dockworkers, fishermen, a lorry driver, as it evolves towards abstraction. The figures slowly disappear but Clough’s close observation of colour, texture and form remain constant throughout, as does her fascination with the human impact on landscape. It was this distinct visual language that marked her out as one of the 20th century’s most exceptional female artists. Spanning six decades of her career, the exhibition…