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A Female Gaze
A Female Gaze
HENI Talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, explores the complexities behind female self-portraiture, showing stunning examples by artist Issy Wood.
Three striking works by the London based artist Issy Wood, unpacks the bold new ways of creating self portraits. Working with found images and combining different styles and techniques, her work offers new ways of understanding the self and perceptions of women in the 21st Century.
Time Period:
21st century
Themes:
Dr Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, curator and lecturer. In September 2020 she joined the National Portrait Gallery as the Chanel Curator for the Collection to lead on Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, a new three-year project supported by CHANEL Culture Fund, which aims to enhance the representation of female artists and sitters in the Gallery’s Collection.
From 2016 to 2020 she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department at University College London (UCL) and continues to be a longstanding member of faculty on Sotheby’s Institute’s MA in Contemporary Art. Previously she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where she worked on exhibitions, acquisitions and permanent collection displays. At Tate Modern she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for: Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). From 2010 to 2011 she was the recipient of the prestigious Hilla Rebay International Fellowship from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
She holds a PhD from UCL, an MA in Art History from University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from John Cabot University, Rome. She has published academic and catalogue essays and articles on a range of subjects including: post-war European art with a focus on Italian art, pop art, exhibition histories and feminist art. Between 2018 and 2019, she published two books, Pop Art and Women Artists both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series. Most recently, she co-edited a volume of collected essays New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021) texts which originated in a symposium held at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Copenhagen in 2017. She is currently at work on a new book, considering the history, meaning and challenges of Transcultural Curating (Lund Humphries, 2023).
As an independent curator, her recent curatorial work includes: Carol Rama: Eye of Eyes (Lévy Gorvy, New York, 2019), Boom: Art and Industry in 1960s Italy (Tornabuoni, London, 2018) Invisible Cities (Waddington Custot, London, 2018) and Evolutionary Travels the inaugural show of Fundación Arte in Buenos Aires in 2016. She is currently curating exhibitions for Dia Art Foundation, New York and MACBA - Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
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Daguerreotype-mania
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08:02
Miniaturising Portraits
HENI Talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery discover portrait miniatures, one of the most intimate forms of art, designed to be ‘viewed ... in hand near unto the eye’. Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature painting of Sir Kenelm Digby, Naval commander, diplomat and scientist, is a great example of how these miniature works of art, were usually painted on the reverse of a playing card, often mounted within a jewelled case that could be worn, carried in a pocket or kept for private display within the home.
09:19
The Portrait of Mai
HENI Talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, explores the importance of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ spectacular Portrait of Mai (Omai). Dr Lucy Pelzt, explains in detail, Sir Joshua Reynolds’ majestic painting which holds a pivotal place in global art history, depicting the first Polynesian to visit Britain, and is widely regarded as the finest portrait by one of Britain’s greatest artists.
04:09
Daguerreotype-mania
HENI Talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, examines and demonstrates the introduction of the daguerreotype from 1839 that marked a revolution in portrait making. Daguerreotype portraiture caught the public’s imagination, and the photographic studios where they were lucrative businesses and quickly sprang up around the world. This film explores work made by the two earliest photographic portrait studios in London, set up by Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet. They opened within months of each other in 1841, and are considered the birth of portrait photography in the United Kingdom.
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