A blockbuster women’s art exhibition that goes beyond Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins , and the forgotten female names finally making big bucks at Auckland’s art auctions. Kim Knight reports. To quote from the book of the exhibition: “Audacious pink nipples, like a pair of unblinking eyes, stare out from Turkish Bath , circa 1930 .
..” Women, as seen by the modernist woman artist.
And the artist, in turn, seen by a new generation of curators, writers and thinkers. Eileen Mayo’s bare-breasted female bathers are on the first wall in the first room of a major new exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki . Thirty years after she made the colour linocut, British-born Mayo was living in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Almost 100 years after she made the linocut, it has been recontextualised in an exhibition rewriting Aotearoa’s art history. As essayist Chelsea Nichols notes, scantily clad women bathing are a common visual trope: “Usually the steamy, voyeuristic fantasies of male artists. Mayo .
.. does not shy away from the eroticism of the subject.
But her bathers aren’t just lying around like sexy steamed vegetables.”.