20 female artists you should know
Nov 16, 2021
To celebrate International Women's Day, we present you the 20 female artists you should know. Here is a selection of their most notable exhibitions and works to buy.
Marina Vargas
Marina Vargas (Granada, Spain, 1980) has a degree in Fine Arts and expanded her knowledge with a Master's degree in Art Production and Research at the University of Granada. She is a versatile artist who approaches different branches of art such as drawing, painting, sculpture-painting, sculpture, photography, video art and installation, among others. Her work explores the relationship between conflicting feelings, love-hate, attraction-rejection, empathy-apathy, closeness and distance, the absurdity of human existence, death, among other topics.
The work of Cristina Toledo (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 1986) is based on an interest in the transformation of the photographic image into a pictorial image. She uses existing photographs as a starting point to create paintings with which she intends to substantially change the relationship we establish with that representation, and reactivate its capacity to transmit meanings or pose questions. In a world full of visual stimuli, she considers painting to be an appropriate mechanism to give a much more corporeal dimension to certain images from among the overabundance of them that surrounds us in digital format and in a fleeting way.
Magdalena Correa (Santiago, Chile, 1968) has specialized in artistic projects in which, through photography and video, she shows her sociological research in isolated and extreme territories where human beings live. The artist carries out a complete personal immersion in the places she visits, resulting in a long series of striking images of lives in extreme places. In the exhibition “Vidas en el límites” (Lives on the Limit), you can see a careful selection of various collections that this artist has presented in various institutions and museums in different countries over the years.
Livia Marin (Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1973) is a Chilean artist based in London whose work has always been characterised by large-scale installations and the appropriation of mass-produced and mass-consumed objects. Her work was initially grounded in the immediate social and political context of Chile in the 1990s which amounted to a transition from a deeply open disciplinary regime (given by seventeen years of dictatorship) to an economically disciplinary regime with a strongly developed neoliberal economic agenda.
Rita Ferreira’s painting (Óbidos, Portugal, 1991) draws on ephemeral elements and old memories from her personal archive, whose legibility, however, is excluded and deferred. She obtained a degree in painting from the School of Fine Arts of Lisbon (University of Lisbon). In 2016 she received the “Bolsa Jovens Criadores” scholarship from the Centro Nacional da Cultura. Her work is part of several important national and international collections.
Gloria Martín (Alcalá de Guadaíra, Seville, 1980) has a degree in Fine Arts and a Master's in Art, Idea and Production from the University of Seville. She is also a professor of Plastic Arts at the School of Art in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz). Her artistic practice is interested in everything that has to do with the artistic object and the contextual, situational and institutional framework of the work of art. For this reason, her pictorial work is based on the museum universe and the sacralization of the artistic object as a contemporary vestige and reflects on its meaning, history and mode of contextualization.
With an installation approach to different media such as sculpture, video, photography or painting, Marina González Guerreiro (Pontevedra, Spain, 1992) reviews the iconographic imaginary around the idea of happiness, paying special attention to phenomena related to stress management and the construction of an idealized nature.
Ana H. del Amo
Ana H. del Amo (Cáceres, Spain, 1977) imitates nature itself when she looks at the insignificant to reach the transcendent, when she demands from the spectator a more attentive vision and a circular, not linear, understanding; when she presents her work as a game of subtleties where materials, shapes, colors and textures seem to start a spontaneous and festive dance, inherent to another free and optimistic way of seeing the world, supported by sensuality and counter-asepsis and in no way in need of ironclad rules or steps that follow previously stipulated hierarchies.
Dalila Gonçalves (Castelo de Paiva, Portugal. 1982) holds a degree in Fine Arts and a Master's Degree in Teaching Visual Arts (2009) from the FBAUP and the FPCEUP (University of Porto, 2009). Through an experimental game, Dalila Gonçalves shows us the permeability between the materials and processes of artistic practice and everyday experiences.
The work of Inma Herrera (Madrid, Spain, 1986) analyses, deconstructs and entangles the language of engraving. This language, loaded with complexities, the weight of tradition and work with the body, has become her best ally in her practice to establish relationships between print, sculpture and moving image.
In the last years of her work, Teresa Costa Gomes (Lisbon, Portugal, 1993) , who studied Plastic Arts at ESAD.cr (Calda da Rainha, PT), has been attracting an audience that follows her artistic work because if the work has something that surprises us due to its emotional diversity - something that is not always consensual - we are also attracted to this emerging artist by the depth of her pictorial and figurative register, which reminds us of the technique of the old Masters of oil painting on wood of the Dutch School.
Rebeca Khamlichi (Madrid, Spain, 1987) is not a painter. She is a way of painting. In her universe, graphic design and 17th-century religious iconography, cartoons and Michael Haneke, bubblegum pink and Goya's Black Paintings, Superflat and copla coexist side by side: something like if Doña Concha Piquer were to sing haikus.
In her early days, the artist Rosa Torres (Valencia, Spain, 1948) was part of Equipo Crónica. Her well-known and personal style uses the landscape as a monographic visual seal, one of the main axes of her career that she has defined to exorbitant limits, limiting natural forms from abstraction to the most extreme synthesis, with a reduced and determined vision in search of extracting the essence of reality.
Photography is at the heart of Lilly Lulay's (Frankfurt, Germany, 1985) artistic production and research, but rather than producing photographs for its own sake, she is interested in the role that photography plays in our daily lives. Lilly Lulay studied photography, sculpture and media sociology in Germany and France. For her photography-based works, Lilly Lulay has won several awards and scholarships such as. In addition, her work is part of important collections.
The work of Nora Aurrekoetxea (Bilbao, Spain, 1989) is based on a sculptural way of understanding and constructing installations where different formal languages - text, objects and performance - share the same space and time. It focuses on the emotional and psychological aspects of experience, and delves into the complex individual and collective psychological dynamics in the intimate sphere. The objects are presented in relation to the space they occupy, functioning as a system of codependency where the form can achieve its own autonomy and places the instability of the narratives as its structure.
María Luisa Beneytez (Seville, Spain, 1980) holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Seville, with a thesis dedicated to women as a subject of representation in Western painting. Her work has always been linked to painting, specifically landscape painting, and she has participated in several collective exhibitions with the University's research group El Observatorio del Paisaje , including Diálogos de piedra y agua (Alcalá de Guadaíra Museum, Seville, 2012).
Alba Escayo (Avilés, Spain, 1981) has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University and continued her postgraduate studies in Bologna and Belgrade. Escayo lives in Madrid and frequently participates in international exhibitions and projects. Collaborations with other artists and institutions have led her to work regularly in Singapore and the Balkans.
Angela Gurría (Mexico City, Mexico, 1929) was a student of the sculptor Germán Cueto, who introduced abstractionism to the sculptural forms of modern art in Mexico. She later apprenticed in Mario Zamora's workshop and continued her learning to develop other techniques in England, France, Italy, the United States, and Greece. At that time, she signed her works under male pseudonyms such as Alberto Gurría or Ángel Gurría, however, over time she left behind anonymity and became a pioneer in modern Mexican sculpture, achieving recognition with her public and monumental work in Mexico.
Regine Schumann (Goslar, Germany, 1961) studied art at the Hochschule fur Bildende Künste in Braunschweig from 1982 to 1989. In 1989 she trained with the painter Roland Dörfler. From 1986 to 1994 she was a member of the Freiraum group of artists, together with Frank Fuhrmann and Dieter Hinz. In addition to various commissions for public works, she has received numerous grants, including a DAAD scholarship to Italy in 1990 and a stay in Japan funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2000. In 1996 she received the Saving Bank Art Award and in 2006 the Leo Breuzer Prize.
Ana Sacerdote (Rome, Italy, 1925) is an Argentine abstract artist living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sacerdote graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon in Buenos Aires and studied with Lino Enea Spilimbergo and Hector Cartier. In the mid-1950s she exhibited with Carmelo Arden Quin, Martín Blaszko, Gregorio Vardanega, Virgilio Villalba, Luis Tomasello and others at the Asociación Arte Nuevo de Buenos Aires, organized by Aldo Pellegrini. In 1956, with the recommendations of Jorge Romero Brest and Pablo Curatella Manes, Sacerdote received a scholarship from the French government to live and study in Paris. She continued painting through the 1960s, when she became interested in video art and later in computer-generated drawings.
