"Men put me down as the best woman painter…
…I think I’m one of the best painters."
Georgia O’Keeffe
Tate Modern’s highly anticipated Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition is now open. It comes just a few weeks after Tate Modern opened the new doors of its ‘Switch House’ development. We were amazed by the new building, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron. It has increased the gallery space by 60% with an emphasis on live art, film works and contemporary installation art.
Tate's Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition is on until October 30th - it's one of our must-see shows this year and showcases over 100 paintings. Georgia O’Keeffe's work is synonymous with enlarged natural forms from flowers to foliage to skulls as well as the desert landscape she lived in. She is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated female artists of the twentieth-century and a major American art icon.
The work below right is the world's most expensive painting to be sold at auction by a woman painter - and is on display at Tate.
Her painted flowers have been subjected to constant sexualisation, frequently likened to forms from the female anatomy. The Tate’s exhibition aims to challenge this; they explain how the artist herself resisted these claims and how these have now become ‘gendered cliches’. Instead, visitors will be presented with the journey of a multi-faceted artist, an empowered woman painting the landscape she lived in.
In the 1920s O'Keeffe became widely recognised as one of the founding figures of American Modernism among a largely male art crowd. In 1946 she became the first woman to have a retrospective at MoMA in New York. In Tate's exhibition her passion and innovation shine through, a truly inspiring experience.
We were also interested to discover O’Keeffe’s striking home and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is now a public museum. We are always curious to see inside the spaces where artists worked, and in Georgia O’Keeffe’s case the symbols and imagery from her work are embedded within her workspace. The same animal skulls that appear in her work, are placed on her walls. The museum has over 3,000 of her works as well as drawings, artefacts and archive material. To find out more about visiting her beautiful home and studio, visit: www.okeeffemuseum.org
