Women Sculptors Drawings

The seven women artists included in this show are known primarily for their innovations in three-dimensional form, but drawing is in every case close to the centre of their creativity. Their drawings offer us an insight into some of the concerns which are central to their work.

For over half a century Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911) has made one of the most significant contributions to sculptural form. Her drawings communicate her ability to unite image, shape, metaphor and association as an undiluted aesthetic sensation, indicating that it is femaleness that is repressed in dominant representation.

The edges between painting, drawing and sculpture are blurred in the work of Eva Hesse (1936-1970), but it was arguably through the use of line that she found her way to sculpture. Recent exhibitions of her work – and its inclusion in Gravity & Grace – have confirmed the influence of her art amongst young sculptors, particularly women.

Much of the work of Asta Groeting (b. 1961) is concerned with relating industrial and organic processes. Her drawings elaborate upon a humanism which is central to all her work. In particular, they explore concrete physical and psychological states evoked in her sculpture by a sensitive and discerning approach to materials.

The drawings of Roni Horn (b.1955) play an important role in her exploration and identification of space and place. With their simple forms and colours and thick application of pure pigment, her drawings have a startling plasticity. Recent drawings echo the theme of doubling and pairing – a theme which has been a determining characteristic in her sculpture.

The titles that Kathy Temin (b.1968) gives to some of her works (such as ‘The Duck/Rabbit Problem’) indicate her ironic attitude to the modernist notion of art-making as problem-solving. Her work coopts the formal strategies of Pop Art as well as those of important female precursors such as Meret Oppenheim and Eva Hesse. Tackling questions of the popular, the feminine, sentiment, colour, the body, nostalgia and childhood, her work strikes at the notion of universality, in order to explore the peculiar.

Since the start of the ’80s, Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952) has been close to a certain feminist fluidity that has played a decisive role in contemporary German creativity. Drawing, sculpture and painting have been equally important in a critically-oriented body of work centred around gender and politics.

In the late 1980s Rachel Whiteread (b.1963) began to cast the space around or within ordinary objects such as tables, bathtubs, doors and beds, producing sculptures which embodied specific childhood recollections of claustrophobia and fear. By extending her range of cultural references, Whiteread has invested her work with an even greater emotional resonance. House, a casting of the whole of a derelict house in east London was at once domestic and monumental in its associations.