Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Gagosian announcing the representation of Francesca Woodman
june 07, 2023 - Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian announcing the representation of Francesca Woodman

Gagosian is pleased to announce its partnership with the #woodmanfamilyfoundation to represent the work of #francescawoodman (1958–1981). The Foundation, established by the artist's parents, Betty Woodman (1930–2018) and George Woodman (1932–2017) during their lifetimes, has been active since 2020. Its extensive collection includes lifetime prints and artist's books as well as Francesca Woodman's archive of notebooks, journals, correspondence, and related materials, much previously unknown. Gagosian will present photographs by Woodman at Art Basel this June and is planning an exhibition dedicated to her work in #newyork in spring 2024.The extraordinary body of work that Woodman produced from her first mature photograph taken at age thirteen through her death at age twenty-two has exercised a unique influence on contemporary photography. Born into an artistic family, she grew up in Colorado and Antella, near Florence, Italy. Much of Woodman's work dates from her years as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, which she attended from 1975 to 1978, spending time over 1977–78 in Rome through RISD's honors program. She lived principally in #newyork from January 1979 through January 1981.In her photographs, Woodman explored self-revelation and theatricality, questioning the medium's capacity to invest representation with narrative and allegorical elements. Frequently incorporating her own image, she also pictured other models, both female and male. She was particularly drawn to both the symbolic aspects of the female nude and the timeless and entropic qualities of dilapidated interiors, though she also employed natural settings. Woodman placed mirrors, vitrines, and other objects within her tableaux, positioning figures in relation to them to suggest metamorphosis and paradox.Her oeuvre was animated by exceptional creativity and abiding interests in mythology, literature, and Gothic and Victorian aesthetics; she was also fascinated by the Surrealists and later artists who had extended their inquiries and subversions in both Europe and the United States. In addition, her work emerged in an era of feminism and Post-Minimalism, with Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Deborah Turbeville among her predecessors and contemporaries.Woodman often worked serially, exploring themes in sequence and inscribing her prints with diaristic and poetic phrases. In her final year, she began experimenting with new methods, including large-scale blue and sepia diazotypes, a technique conventionally used to create architectural blueprints. She also made artist's books, transforming nineteenth- and twentieth-century journals and notebooks with sequences of prints, transparencies, and inscriptions. One of these, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, was produced during her lifetime and published by Synapse Press in 1981. In June 2023, MACK, London, will publish Francesca Woodman: The Artist's Books, reproducing her eight extant artist's books, including two that have never been seen before.From March 21 to June 30, 2024, the National Portrait Gallery, London, will present Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In. With more than 150 vintage prints, the exhibition presents thematic affinities between two influential female photographers who worked a century apart.Francesca Woodman was born in 1958 in Denver, and died in #newyork in 1981. Collections include Metropolitan Museum of Art, #newyork; Museum of Modern Art, #newyork; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, #newyork; Whitney Museum of American Art, #newyork; International Center of Photography, #newyork; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Denver Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Tate, London. Exhibitions include Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, Hunter College Art Gallery, #newyork (1986, traveled through 1988); Francesca Woodman: Photographic Arbeiten, Shedhalle, Zurich, (1992, traveled through 1993); Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris (1998, traveled through 2002); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011–12, traveled to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, #newyork, 2012); and On Being an Angel, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015, traveled through 2020).#FrancescaWoodman