Last year, a major exhibition at the Royal Academy celebrated the work of the performance art pioneer Marina Abramović, and this autumn the 77-year-old opened her first exhibition in China at the Modern Art Museum of Shanghai. Joan Snyder, aged 84, recently joined Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and later this month will show Body & Soul, a new exhibition showcasing over six decades of the New Yorker’s work. Martha Jungwirth, also 84 and at Ropac, recently exhibited at the Guggenheim in Bilbao as well as opening the day and evening sales in October at Sotheby’s. The type of art in demand is also expanding. Barbara Kruger, aged 79, whose critically acclaimed 2024 show at the Serpentine featured installations, moving images and soundscapes (Barbara Chase-Riboud, 85, held a sculptural show, Infinite Folds, at the same gallery a year prior), is currently showing photography at the Hall Art Foundation in Vermont. Magdalene Odundo, aged 74, is showing ceramics at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London, and Michele Oka Doner, 79, debuts a series of new bronze body sculptures with the Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery in New York this November. Once relegated to the role of muse within art, women are now increasingly its instigators.
At the bedrock of all this creativity stands the collector. Valeria Napoleone, a patron and philanthropist of 30 years and the foremost collector of female artists in the world, said she was “aghast” at how sidelined female artists were when she began her journey in the mid-1990s. Despite the recent advances, she cautions against the artist “being seduced by money, success or being asked to create constant work for art fairs”, explaining that women artists who have been ignored for decades now have substantial bodies of work that are “real” and “uncontaminated” by the market – which is exactly the kind of work she gravitates towards. She is keen to point out, however, that this “choir of female voices” she collects are first and foremost about talent; they just happen to be women.
“Listening to Nightingales II” by Maggi Hambling (2023) © Maggi Hambling, photograph by Douglas Atfield
