I want my pictures to have a certain timeless, personal but allegorical quality like they do in say ingres [sic] history paintings, but I like the rough edge that photography gives a nude_._—Francesca Woodman
Read MoreOver a career that spanned less than a decade, Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) created a body of work that has proven uniquely influential on contemporary photography. She explored self-revelation and theatricality, questioning her medium's capacity to invest representation with narrative and allegorical elements. Frequently taking herself as a subject, Woodman also pictured other models, both female and male. She often worked serially, producing both individual prints and artist's books. Woodman was drawn to the symbolic aspects of the female nude, the timeless and entropic qualities of dilapidated interiors, and natural settings. She regularly placed mirrors, vitrines, and other objects within her tableaux, positioning them in relation to figures to suggest metamorphosis and paradox.
Born in Boulder, Colorado, to artists George and Betty Woodman, Woodman grew up in Colorado and near Florence, Italy, and attended high school in Massachusetts and Colorado. She made her first mature work, Self-portrait at 13, in 1972, in which she obscures her face while foregrounding the camera's cable release.
Much of Woodman's oeuvre dates from her years at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, which she attended from 1975 to 1978, spending time in 1977–78 in Rome through RISD's honours program. While in Rome, Woodman had a solo exhibition in 1978 at Libreria Maldoror, a bookstore and gallery she frequented that championed avant-garde art and literature, and she was included in a group exhibition at Galleria Ugo Ferranti the same year.
Woodman's photographs are animated by her exceptional creativity and abiding interests in mythology, literature, and Gothic and Victorian aesthetics; she was also fascinated by the Surrealists and later artists who extended their subversive inquiries in both Europe and the United States. She emerged in the era of second-wave feminism and Post-Minimalism, with artists Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Deborah Turbeville among her contemporaries.
Woodman moved to New York in January 1979, and in the summer of 1980 was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In her last year in New York, she began experimenting with new methods, making large-scale blue or sepia diazotypes with a technique conventionally used to create architects' blueprints. The largest and most complex of these diazotypes, _Blueprint for a Temple _(1980), was exhibited at the Alternative Museum, New York, in 1980. One of two versions of this work is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her artist's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries was produced during her lifetime and published by Synapse Press in 1981. Woodman died in New York City on January 19, 1981.
Woodman's first posthumous exhibition was held in 1986 at the Hunter College Art Gallery, New York, and then traveled nationally. Organised by Ann Gabhart with Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, it was the first of many subsequent solo and group exhibitions, and led to the acquisition of Woodman's photographs by public institutions worldwide. Today, the Woodman Family Foundation stewards the artist's legacy and that of her parents.
Text courtesy Gagosian.