GROUP EXHIBITION

Despite the many obstacles they faced, women have always been part of art’s history. In the European narrative, they appear in ancient Greek and Roman accounts, in medieval manuscripts and in the writings of Giorgio Vasari, the foremost chronicler of Renaissance creativity. In 15th- and 16th-century Italy alone, at least a hundred women were artists, some achieving extraordinary fame. Sofonisba Anguissola was the most prolific self-portraitist between Dürer and Rembrandt. The Baroque firebrand Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the 17th century’s most powerful painters; in the 18th century, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s favourite, left behind a staggering 660 portraits, 40 self-portraits and 200 landscape paintings. By the late 19th century, Mary Cassatt was at the very heart of Impressionism. Still, none of these women had any political agency; their careers were shaped and often constrained by male authority. Access to training was a struggle. Public art academies in many countries barred women until the 19th century, and even those who studied privately were largely forbidden from working with live models.

A room of her own was built with these stories in mind, both the ones we know and the ones that have gone untold. As its title suggests, the exhibition offers a comfort zone where paintings by women are not exceptions but the rule. Beyond comfort, it invites a shift in perspective. The familiar script – art as a relay race of great men, the hierarchy that places grand subjects above those deemed domestic or decorative, the idea that female nudes belong to the male gaze by default – starts to unravel. Here, those old assumptions are left at the door.

About the nature of women’s art and women’s absence from the canon, feminist writer Germaine Greer once stated: ‘So much art is about art, but there is, there must be an art which is about life, an art which has hardly been able to call attention to itself, an art without monuments.’ A room of her own is openly unmonumental in this sense. A warm, tulip-scented room, a cozy space where paintings reach for one another, not in competition, but in kinship, a sisterhood of generous forms, bold colour fields, deep eyes and gestures of care. The main subject is the intimacy and peace that women experience when they are left alone, with nobody observing them: when they linger over a written page at the breakfast table, lose themselves in the gaze of the sky, talk with their houseplants, sit loosely on a couch, smile with their children nestled against their chests. Women of all ages bask, untroubled by their nudity, shielded from the world outside their sun-dappled gardens and manicured rooms. Thought unfolds freely; one might even collapse onto the grass and do nothing. In this room, there is a sense that one could simply be. Art feels like quiet, safety and home.