My daughter was in New York during the recent Whitney Biennial. When she came back to California she brought with her an intense enthusiasm (expressed
here) for the one-third chunk of the show curated by Michelle Grabner, a painter herself and a professor in the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My daughter's descriptions led me to look more closely at what she had liked, and also to read the press release issued by the Whitney, of which I quote (below) a fragment concerning the female abstract expressionists in the show
—
 |
| Amy Sillman |
"Painting also figures prominently here—in particular, large-scale abstraction by women artists. In the United States, big-brush expressionism has historically been associated with a kind of heroic masculinity. But as painter Amy Sillman (whose work is included here) has written: “Many artists—not least of them woman and queers—are currently recomplicating the terrain of gestural, messy, physical, chromatic, embodied, handmade practices.” Grabner has included a group of ambitious paintings by women of different generations, demonstrating that this “recomplicating” has resulted in paintings that subvert the tradition of painting in ways that may be personal, funny, perverse, or metaphysical."
 |
| Suzanne McClelland |
 |
| Louise Fishman |
 |
| Louise Fishman |
 |
| Jacqueline Humphries |
 |
| Jacqueline Humphries |
 |
| Molly Zuckerman-Hartung |
 |
| Molly Zuckerman-Hartung |
 |
| Dona Nelson |
 |
| Dona Nelson |
 |
| Dona Nelson |
 |
| Dona Nelson |