The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men
Cheim & Read
547 West 25th St, New York
June 23 – September 2
Cheim & Read Gallery is exhibiting a group show of thirty-two female artists kaleidoscopic interpretations of men. “The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men,” is curated by John Cheim and is a sequel to the first iteration in 2009, The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women. The shows span a variety of media, including painting, photography, and sculpture.
This exhibition, Part Two: Women Look at Men, comments on gender and sexuality by concentrating on the notion of a reversal of mannerisms that are associated with gender. The works in the show presents men in a mirror image of their oppressive gaze. The first exhibition, “Women Look at Women,” used the female gaze to reclaim the traditionally associated subjectivity female figures have been predisposed to by the “male gaze.” Both explore the problem of a relatively simple question: would we react differently to these works if they were made by a man?
A subject from Sylvia Sleigh’s painting, Paul Rosano in Jacobsen Chair, 1971, that will be apart of the exhibition, wrote: “She was placing me in what many would interpret as a feminine pose, or what you would expect to see in traditional or historical paintings of women, certainly not of men. This became an underlying theme in many of her works. The reversal.”
The Untitled Space recently had an exhibition In the Raw: The Female Gaze on the Nude. The exhibition had a different perspective on the subject matter. As curator Indira Cesarine notes, pieces in the show “touch on what many would consider taboo subjects of female rites of passage, sexuality, fear and fantasy. When viewing the work of these artists it is clear that not only do women have a very different voice, but also are breaking boundaries with work that reveals their own unique experiences, desires, feelings and emotions.”
Female artists represented in “The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men” at Cheim & Read will be Berenice Abbott, Ellen Altfest, Ghada Amer, Diane Arbus, Gina Beavers, Lynda Benglis, Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Katherine Bradford, Cecily Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Lois Dodd, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Katy Grannan, Grace Graupe-Pillard, EJ Hauser, Celia Hempton, Jenny Holzer, Chantal Joffe, Sarah Lucas, Catherine Murphy, Alice Neel, Catherine Opie, Collier Schorr, Dana Schutz, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Sylvia Sleigh, Betty Tompkins, Nicole Wittenberg and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Opens Thursday, June 23 from 6–8 pm
