Ortuzar Projects is pleased to present a selection of paintings and sculptures by Gertrude Abercrombie, Lynda Benglis, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Suzanne Jackson, Lois Lane, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Maruja Mallo, Rosemary Mayer, Betye Saar, Joan Snyder, Anita Steckel, Alma Thomas, Hannah Wilke, and Takako Yamaguchi for Frieze Masters 2023. The works on display, which range from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the millennium, explore the gendered associations of materiality, form and texture. The paintings on view center the feminine, albeit often through non-representational means, while the selected sculptures represent the historical challenge by women artists in the 1970s and ‘80s to uproot notions of traditional 20th-century Euro-American sculpture.

Chase-Riboud’s Zanzibar / Gold # 2 (1977), composed of ribbons of bronze seemingly suspended upon cascading silk tassels, overturns the natural order of sculpture by creating a surreal contrast in weight and volume. Benglis’s metalized knots and pleated wall sculptures, which were conceived as an answer to the hard-edged objects of minimalism, playfully fuse organic form and industrial processes to create “frozen gestures” that echo the proportions of the artist’s own body. Wilke, who is also widely known for her performance work, explored iconographies of the female form with sculptural objects like Geo-Logic 4 to One, from the "Generation Process Series" #1 (1980-82), in which a wooden base is painted in four primary-colored quadrants topped with folded, ceramic female genitalia in alternating colors. In Mayer’s ethereal sculpture of fabric draped over a collapsible wooden structure, Scarecrow (model) for a field (1978–1979), the artist evokes the scarecrow as an emblem of continual change, mystery, and human’s place within nature.

Alongside Chase-Riboud, the booth includes several key figures from a generation of Black women artists who have had a significant impact on the history of contemporary painting and assemblage in the United States. Lovelace O’Neal, Jackson, and Saar were socially and professionally entwined in the California Black Arts Movement of the ‘70s, exhibiting frequently together on the West Coast. The Phrenologer’s Window II (1966), one of the earliest examples of Saar’s assemblages, is a combination of found objects and a lithographic print placed within a window frame–a device that draws a parallel between the act of looking through a window and peering inside an individual’s mind. Jackson’s Not Everything We See is Real (1969) interweaves various motifs used throughout her career–including the hand and heart symbol, birds, and vines–signifying a bond between corporeal and spiritual existence, and between the physicality of nature, animals and the human body. Lovelace O’Neal’s Following the Bedouins (from the Panthers in My Father’s Palace series) (1989), alludes to migration, ancestry, and the artist’s own radical political activism while transcending the representational through an expressionist use of color and form. Thomas was one of the first Black woman artists to overcome the gender and racial barriers built to exclude Black women from the mainstream art world.

Many of the other exhibited paintings engage with symbols of femininity. In Yamaguchi’s Innocent Bystander #9 (1989), a reclining nude appropriated from Lucas Cranach the Elder witnesses the formation of a syncretic world of painterly flourishes derived from Western and Asian art history. In Abercrombie and Mallo’s surrealist paintings, flowers, shells, or eggs become mysterious cyphers. Snyder’s RAW/WAR (2003) thickly layers a palette evocative of viscera, which drips down the canvas’ vertical axis and is violently inscribed with the titular words. In Lane’s Untitled (Fan and Woman) (1999), the silhouette of a demure figure is enframed by the decorative trappings of class and privilege. This sense of propriety is ruptured in Steckel’s “Anita of New York Meets Tom of Finland'' series (2004–2005), in which nude female figures interlope in Tom of Finland’s images of gay cruising, interjecting women into a realm of uninhibited sexuality.