Feminist art 21st century
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
Zoe Leonard is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
Judith Linhares is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings. She synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican modern art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor. In the early 1970s, Linhares created narrative drawings and assemblages that appropriated commonplace or "craft" materials and feminine imagery (flowers, eggs, swan feathers, domestic scenes). After 1980 she developed a Symbolist allegorical world of enigmatic, bulbous-headed creatures, narcoleptic nudes, phantasms, figures in boats, and human metamorphosis. Her fantastic imagery was balanced by lush color, painterly sensual surfaces, and sure design. Through the 1990s, critics noted in her work a sunnier palette, increasingly abstract and ambiguous imagery, and a growing facility with a naïve drawing style. In the 2000s, Linhares has turned to female nudes (often monumental), visionary landscapes, floral still lifes and animals. Linhares has been recognized with more than forty-five one-person exhibitions and major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Jennifer Anne Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art.
Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collected Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies). In the 1980s, she used color film and large prints, and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression.