Lisa Le Feuvre
Great Women Sculptors
Video
Art historian, author and curator Lisa Le Feuvre has been involved with sculpture in contemporary art in various capacities throughout her career. For many years, she developed an outstanding program for the Henry Moore Institute with artists such as Mario Merz, Sarah Lucas, Paul Neagu and Aleksandra Domanović, before taking over as the first female director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation in 2017. As a foundation established by artists, it is dedicated to the artistic legacy of the two land art pioneers Nancy Holt (1938−2014) and Robert Smithson (1938−1973). The Foundation seeks to explore new avenues at the increasingly relevant interface between art and ecology. The extensive publication Great Women Sculptors, co-edited by Le Feuvre was recently published by Phaidon in collaboration with the Holt/Smithson Foundation. It gathers more than 300 female artists who have been excluded from institutions and the canon based on their gender.
For the preface, Le Feuvre writes: “The ubiquity of objects and experiences makes sculpture profoundly human and acutely powerful as an art form. Sculpture is concerned with bodies, with pushing against and pulling with the space that holds it. It is a situated object –– contingent on circumstances of production, reception and distribution. The following pages underline sculpture as a productive and fertile realm of artistic production, study and engagement that resonates with the ways in which we attempt to order and understand the world that surrounds us. Sculpture is everywhere, but everything is not sculpture. Sculpture can be fleeting, time-bound, contingent, fluid and temporal. It is material and thought, additive and subtractive, autonomous and contingent, permanent and impermanent, temporal and timeless.”
In her lecture, Le Feuvre will talk about these and other qualities, drawing on some key examples from the publication and discussing the relevance of the whole project in highlighting the hugely significant contribution of women sculptors, past and present.
Exhibition Page
Artists
Participating artists
Lisa Le Feuvre
is a curator, writer, and editor. In 2018 she became inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist foundation dedicated to the legacies of artists Nancy Holt (1938 – 2014) and Robert Smithson (1938 – 1973). From its home base in New Mexico, the Foundation collaborates with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions to realize exhibitions, publish books, initiate artist commissions, program educational events, encourage research, and develop collections across the world.
Le Feuvre has curated more than seventy exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, edited over thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists. Her 2024 curated exhibitions include For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 at The Warehouse, Dallas (curated with Thomas Feulmer), Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (curated with Clara Meister), and Robert Smithson / Teresita Fernández at SITE SANTA FE (curated with Fernández), and her 2024 publications include the introduction to the compendium Great Women Sculptors ( Phaidon Press) and texts on the artists Anne Hardy, Lucia Pizzani, and Medardo Rosso.
Previously based in the UK, she led the Henry Moore Institute from 2010 through 2017, directed the contemporary art program at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich from 2005 to 2009), was an academic based in the graduate Curatorial Program at Goldsmiths College, and Course Director of the graduate program in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck College, University of London.
More contributions
Eva Ursprung
The Art of Surfacing
Slide show
With the exhibition The Art of Surfacing, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents the multifaceted work of Austrian artist, musician, and curator Eva Ursprung, who was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Province of Styria in 2024. Her cross-media, feminist, and socially critical approaches revolve around the element of water as a metaphor for change and political and ecological processes.
Slide show Eva Ursprung Susanne Wenger
Àdùnní Olórìṣà
Slide show
Susanne Wenger gilt als eine zentrale Künstlerin Österreichs nach 1945 und als frühe Wegbereiterin des Surrealismus. Ihr Œuvre, das Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Drucke und Batiken umfasst, überschreitet ästhetische Kategorien und verbindet Kunst, Spiritualität und Mythos.
Slide Show Susanne Wenger Exhibition Tour
Diego Bianchi: Errores Irreales
Video
Diego Bianchi’s immersive sculptural installations reinterpret the concepts of sculpture and of the torso, taking seriously the sensitivity and distress of the human body as subjected to manifold pressures, and expanding and updating its forms of expression.
Exhibition Tour Diego Bianchi Exhibition Tour
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda
Video
A metabolic force governs the growth of Celina Eceiza’s work, which involves textile collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings — both tiny and colossal in scale — as laborious as they are elementary. The artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, found object collages and, more recently, chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity.
Ausstellungsrundgang Celina Eceiza Annemarie Arzberger
dreamed awake
Slide show
For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist has developed her first own performative presentation, with a setting for her puppets with three scenes set in an imaginary spaceship, an exhibition, and the spaces that the scenes depict: the Schlouflaboar, the Houloudecks, and the Space Grotto Disco. The piece is a combination of physical theater and puppetry, performed by the artist together with her sister Katharina Arzberger and accompanied by musical interludes arranged by Manuel Obriejtan.
Slide Show Annemarie Arzberger Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales
Slide show
Diego Bianchi (*1969 Buenos Aires, lives in Buenos Aires) is considered one of Argentina’s leading artists and has, in particular, updated the concept of sculpture. For his installative and performative exhibition Errores Irreales at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Bianchi has assembled a selection of his sculptures that play with the concept of the body.
Slide show Diego Bianchi Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales
Performance
Slide show
Errores Irreales is only truly activated by the performance staged by Diego Bianchi himself in order to complete his theatrical installation, which takes physicality and its limits to a new level.
Diego Bianchi, Performance Celina Eceiza
Ofrenda
Slide show
Ofrenda [Offering] presents a way of inhabiting a space as if the architecture were a body, breathing erratically, changing states as you pass from one room to the next. The rigidity of the building collapses as the walls are draped in thousands of metres of fabric joined together through the collective and timeless action of sewing, until they form a single smooth surface, sensitive to the slightest change.
Slide show Celina Eceiza