NANCY SPERO °1926 - †2009 (US)
A leading figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960s, Nancy Spero explored female sexuality, suffering, and heroism, as well as the horrors of war, in gouache and ink works on paper.
Spero drew from ancient mythologies and iconographies to produce her burlesque cast of pagan goddesses, Celtic fertility figures, and Amazon warriors, which she pulled from books on ancient art before manipulating and incorporating them into her own drawings and collages.
Her well-known 1966–70 “War” series, produced during the Vietnam years, explored the atrocities of war, a subject Spero revisited in her later career with frieze-like drawings installed around the walls of galleries, depicting masses of screaming figures and helicopters overhead dropping human-shaped bombs.
"I have deliberately attempted to distance my art from the Western emphasis on the subjective portrayal of individuality by using a hand-printing and collage technique utilizing zinc plates as an artist's tool instead of a brush or palette knife. Figures derived from various cultures co-exist in simultaneous time... The figures themselves could become hieroglyphs--extensions of a text denoting rites of passage, birth to old age, motion and gesture... Woman as activator or protagonist dancing in procession, elegiac or celebrator a continuous presence, engaged directly or glimpsed peripherally; the eye, as a moving camera, scans the re-imaging of women."
A leading figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960s, Nancy Spero explored female sexuality, suffering, and heroism, as well as the horrors of war, in gouache and ink works on paper.
Spero drew from ancient mythologies and iconographies to produce her burlesque cast of pagan goddesses, Celtic fertility figures, and Amazon warriors, which she pulled from books on ancient art before manipulating and incorporating them into her own drawings and collages.
Her well-known 1966–70 “War” series, produced during the Vietnam years, explored the atrocities of war, a subject Spero revisited in her later career with frieze-like drawings installed around the walls of galleries, depicting masses of screaming figures and helicopters overhead dropping human-shaped bombs.
"I have deliberately attempted to distance my art from the Western emphasis on the subjective portrayal of individuality by using a hand-printing and collage technique utilizing zinc plates as an artist's tool instead of a brush or palette knife. Figures derived from various cultures co-exist in simultaneous time... The figures themselves could become hieroglyphs--extensions of a text denoting rites of passage, birth to old age, motion and gesture... Woman as activator or protagonist dancing in procession, elegiac or celebrator a continuous presence, engaged directly or glimpsed peripherally; the eye, as a moving camera, scans the re-imaging of women."
Male Bomb (from War Series), 1966 - Gouache and ink on paper - 60 x 90 cm
Black and the Red III, 1994 - Exhibition view Malmö Konsthall - Photo Credit David Reynolds.
Black and the Red III, 1994 - Handprinting and printed collage on paper - 22 panels, each approximately 50 cm x 245 cm
Black and the Red III, 1994 - Handprinting and printed collage on paper - 22 panels, each approximately 50 cm x 245 cm
Black and the Red III, 1994 - Handprinting and printed collage on paper - 22 panels, each approximately 50 cm x 245 cm