Galerie Lelong & Co.is pleased to present Legacies: Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero & Mildred Thompson. The presentation will focus on Estates of four legendary female artists who each made profound innovations that have lasting influence on contemporary culture. Galerie Lelong has represented the Estate of Ana Mendieta since 1992; Nancy Spero and the Estate since 2001; the Estate of Mildred Thompson since 2017 and co-represented Carolee Schneemann and the Estate with P•P•O•W, New York since 2015.
In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85) created groundbreaking work in photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Amongst the major themes in her work are exile, displacement, and a return to the landscape, themes that remain profoundly relevant today.
Self-described as a painter whose work was profoundly influenced by 20th century “action painters” and the absence of women in art history, Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, photography, performance, film, video, mixed media, and installations. A pioneer of feminist performance who has transformed the very definition of art, Schneemann’s now canonical performances such as Interior Scroll profoundly changed the narratives on gender, pleasure and power.
In a career surpassing 50 years of practice and encompassing many significant visual and cultural movements including Conceptual Art, Post-Modernism, and Feminism, Nancy Spero (1924-2010) made the female experience central to her art. By doing so, she challenged aesthetic and political conventions. Spero’s lexicon was derived from an immersion in the history of images, notably from Egypt, classical antiquity, pre-history, and contemporary news media.
Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) was a painter and sculptor who lived a life outside the borders for Black women in mid-century. She created work inspired by interests ranging from philosophy and music to mathematics and science. Her paintings often feature thickly textured, brightly saturated color segments painted in linear and circular formations. An exhibition—Throughlines, Assemblages and Works on Paper from the 1960s to the 1990s—is on view at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York through March 27, 2021.
Three of the artists in our presentation were closely aligned. Mendieta, Schneemann and Spero all knew each other in New York and sometimes exhibited together. Mendieta and Spero were both part of the women’s collective, A.I.R.
