Martha Edelheit (b. New York, NY, 1931) is a pioneering feminist artist whose work confronts dominant art historical paradigms, foregrounding female gaze and desire. Known for eroticism, her lush and vivid work is at once critical, sensual, and humorous. Edelheit was born in New York City in 1931, where she lived until moving to Sweden in 1993. An important voice for feminist art, she is known for both her frank depictions of sexuality and her insistence on their place within an art historical tradition and society.
In her work of the early 1970s, Martha Edelheit began to work with the combination of nude figures, photographs and memory. She was interested in "montage"—this combination of elements and figures layered into a specific environment – to explore what was integral to establish the space and how symbols could become signifiers of the inner life of her models. Edelheit’s imagination of the body in public spaces responds through a feminist, contemporary lens, to the canon of French painting and the work of Manet and Degas. In her series of “Back” paintings, the bodies of Edelheit’s subjects are juxtaposed with elements of cityscapes which populated her daily life, particularly scenes from Central Park. Edelheit describes these views of the city as deeply personal to her, their intimacy expressed as they dissolve into the body itself.
Regina Granne (b. 1939; d. New York, NY, 2013) was an artist interested in the interplay between representation, perception, and form. While working with the traditional subject matter of Western art, Granne navigated what it meant to be a woman artist. She developed a distinct approach to realism, favoring nudes, still lives, and interiors as compositions that reveal the constructed nature of representation and vision. Her paintings and drawings of the 1960s-90s appear to use neutral subject matter like nudes, domestic objects, and floral arrangements. However, Granne’s awareness of art history’s weight gives gravitas to many of her choices over the period: she worked from the nude, which had long been the exclusive affordance of men, and chose a representational style, when academic taste dictated that only abstraction could be serious.
Jane Kogan (b. 1939, New York, NY) is a painter whose work reveals both internal explorations of the self and universal ideals of femininity. She has worked with a variety of mediums and in many styles, returning often to the female figure as a site of interest. Her Amazon series from the 1960s and 1970s is a unique body of work which investigates the feminism of the period and Kogan’s own identity within the singular format of larger-than-life vertical canvases that are rich with symmetry and symbolism.
The series of women in powerful stances draws inspiration from art historical sources, the feminine divine, and the artist’s imagination. Kogan took a solo trip to India in 1978, and the influence of Hinduism bleeds into her practice. The Hindu belief in dualism is visualized through internal conversations between compositional elements both beautiful and ugly, light and dark. The figures are half-clothed and framed in natural settings by plants and creatures.
