Panther Reading Group
Great Women Sculptors

To accompany the exhibitions Verdet Bath by Caroline Mesquita and The Feast by Leon Höllhumer, we would like to meet again as the Panther Reading Group to devote ourselves to the exhibitions’ central themes by reading texts together.

Taking Caroline Mesquita’s fabulous sculptures as a starting point, we would like to focus in particular on ideas surrounding sculpture, and here primarily on women sculptors in art history, by reading an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre. Le Feuvre co-authored Great Women Sculptors (2024), an extensive anthology on important contributions by female sculptors, which brings together more than 300 women artists from over 500 years who have been largely excluded from the canon of art history and institutions due to their gender. Le Feuvre will also give a lecture at the HALLE FÜR KUNST on February 21, 2024. We will also read Linda Nochlin’s essay Why have there been no great female artists? (1971), which was an important reference for Le Feuvre.

Referring to Leon Höllhumer’s preoccupation with social taboos and the breaking of these in his exhibition The Feast, we will read Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) on the basis of his exhibition. Sigmund Freud defined uncanny sensations as the result of ​“a hidden, familiar thing that was repressed and then emerged from the repression.” Social taboos can be understood in a similar way, which provoke an all the more violent counter-reaction. We will also approach the uncanny from a literary perspective via H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tomb (1922).

Registration is requested by February 10, 2025: cf@​halle-​fuer-​kunst.​at
The texts will be sent to you after registration.