Venus Rising

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0 (1974). © Marina Abramovic Institute

The inventors, not the muses, the creators, not the models. Being closer to Venus than to Mars or Poseidon, they are the power, a strong desire arousing within the very core of their being. The artistic beginning of female artists is undoubtedly a unique essence of energy busting inside the hidden talent succumbed by centuries of oppression. Free to choose, free to love and free to create, they fight with their anger, furious to show the world their presence, their sudden resurrection.  She's got it for sure, and indeed, what's more to it - she is never afraid to show, regardless of success or applause. A goddess on a mountaintop, coming down from the skies to enlighten the artistic horizon with her shining exploration.

History has seen a bunch of women of different descents, beliefs, and fortunes. But this piece isn't about all of them. It's dedicated mainly to those who managed to arouse a fire, a silver flame within our souls. By this small tribute, I'm referring to them - the women of the artistic medium. Indeed, one must be a graceful and bold soul to let the public see and scrutinize one's vision. The ability to escape the mundane echoes of greyish walls and prescribed narrative of oldish times. Not to mention the challenge of feminine narrative throughout history. Even if one would imply that in the current postmodern realism, no such irrelevance is occurring - they would end up being incredibly wrong. So, just like in Maria Tatar's "The Heroine with a 1001 Faces", the narrative of women being here to bring us to life, receive us in death and inspire us diminishes under the light of feminine artistic perspective.

Hope Gangloff

Born in 1974 in New York, Gangloff can be seen as one of the most prominent artists of contemporary figurative painting. Not letting her face be photographed and even more reserved regarding her works in the interviews, she is one of the few artistic icons who prefer the calm solo New York promenades to the bright lights of soffits. Blending elements of portraiture, realism, and expressionism, her style is exceptionally bold and vivid, easily recognized by her unique fusion of vibrant, illustrative patterns with a keen sense of realism. The key features of her brushwork involve portraiture and figurative lenses, the use of patterns, specifically fabrics in her works and expressive contrasting colours. Her meticulous focus on layering and surroundings serves to narrate the nuances of interior and personalities. Some of her innovations include the diffusion of daily and mundane life in a hyper-personalized way. Gangolff is well-known for her ability to transform casual moments into bright and detailed scenes under her creative spectacle. Another vivid point of her artistic signature is the blurred lines between realism and graphic style, which often resembles illustrations rather than realistic depictions. Her works are a deep exploration of casual portraits through the prism of textural magnitude and vibrancy of colours.

Hope Gangloff, Studio View, 2016. Photo by Don Stahl, NYC

Hope Gangloff Study of Olga Alexandrovskaya, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas

Hope Gangloff, Bourgeois Landfill, 2009, Acrylic on Canvas

Marina Abramovićh

A Serbian performance artist who's been in the field for more than five decades, referring to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Constantly pushing the borderlines of her mind and body, she dares to do things no one has ever done before. Intense physical endurance, emotional vulnerability, and interaction with audiences all play a crucial part in the puzzle of her creative execution. Abramović's art is primarily about live performance, where she uses her body as both the subject and the medium. Her work explores themes of physical pain, emotional suffering, endurance, identity, and the limits of the human condition. While her performances are physically intense, they are often presented with minimal staging, focusing the audience's attention entirely on her body and actions. This stark simplicity allows her work's psychological and emotional intensity to come to the forefront. One of the most significant in its simplicity was her long-forgotten "Onion" performance. Abramovich, enormous onion and bright, almost vulgarly reddish lips and nails

Marina Abramovićh, The Onion, 1996

"The camera pans in close on Abramović, who is holding an oversized onion, nails and lips painted bright red. She chomps down voraciously on the onion." Elephant, 2020

Her artistic essence revolves around human strengths and vulnerability, pushing the limits of what we can see, do, and express. Body art and endurance art are Abramovćh's mediums for omnipresent mental and physical explorations.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0 1974 © Milica Zec / Marina Abramovic Institute 

Georgia O'Keeffe

Finding her inspiration in landscape escapism, O'Keeffe is praised as a pioneering figure of American Modernism, illustrating her deep connections with the New Mexico land close to her soul and artistic beginning. Breaking away from art normativity, she engraved herself as an artist of abstract forms and lenses. She blended representational and abstract styles, focusing on line, colour, and shape in a way that brought out the essence of her subjects. O'Keeffe's work often focused on the natural world, but she did not simply reproduce what she saw. Instead, she abstracted and simplified forms to create bold, striking images, alluring us to the scene of vivid exotic flowers only occasionally resembling their original form. The symbolism of her works lies in the flower motives, skulls and bones and American Southwest landscape. O'Keeffe is perhaps most famous for her large-scale paintings of flowers. These works are regarded as a pinnacle of modernism, using simplified forms and bright colours to depict the live-loving nature of the surroundings. While denying the feminine narrative of her work, O'Keeffe nevertheless created a body of work that challenged the male-dominated art world. Her paintings of flowers, often interpreted as symbolic of femininity, were radical for their time because they emphasized strength and power rather than fragility.

“Georgia O’Keeffe on her portal,” Abiquiú, New Mexico, 1960, by Tony Vaccaro

Jimson Weed, Georgia O'Keeffe 1936 Peter Barritt / Alamy Stock Photo

Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

Leaving marks not only on canvas but showcasing their brushwork into the realm of mundanity, the women of art are once again here to save the artistic landscape. Their impact on the artistic landscape is long-lasting, far-beyond the moment. Interpreting love for human nature, people, or surroundings, they immerse us in their worlds - worlds of sense and sensibility. One can not argue against the mystic power of female lead vision, which is full of boldness, gracefulness, and edginess. The raw nature of art under the nuanced perspective of one's eye, peeling the old husk of prejudice and growing the flowers of dignity within. We reached its core, saw, investigated, and tried to sense it. The fleeting moment of orgasmic acquaintance with the borders unexpressed before. The borders closer to Venus rather than Mars or Poseidon.