In the dead of night last spring, as rain fell in stubborn sheets upon the Sussex countryside, 79-year-old artist Maggi Hambling trudged with a group of friends to an opening in the forest where nightingales sang and folk musician Sam Lee led an accompaniment on guitar and violin. Hambling, having survived a near-fatal heart attack in New York the previous year followed by a bleak period of recovery, was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of hope and experienced something akin to a spiritual epiphany. This month, she is sharing it with the world. Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night is the artist’s pivotal new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery. The striking dark paintings feature abstract splashes of gold paint – representing both purity and the divine – and reference bird and human song, inspired by the likes of Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and even a Nina Simone concert she attended in Harlem. Over 50 years into her career, Hambling continues to push the boundaries of her practice with remarkable intensity. “I still work every day. My art is my life,†she says.
Infused with the life experience that comes from decades at the coalface, the work of important female artists in their seventies and eighties is experiencing something of a renaissance. Finally, these women are being recognised and celebrated by the art world ecosystem of galleries, auction houses and museums. This hasn’t always been the case. Throughout the history of Western art, the contribution of women has been largely undervalued and sometimes overlooked entirely. “We’re in a period of great progress,†says Emma Baker, Head of Contemporary Evening Sales at Sotheby’s London. “We’re seeing these artists come to the fore for really good reasons and they’re staying there. It’s not just a moment; it’s a rediscovery and a historical correction.â€
The global feminist art movement, which began in the early 1970s, highlighted and promoted the lives, experiences and work created by women. Women in art, as in society, began to take up a lot more space, and economic power followed. In 2014, a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe sold for $44 million, roughly triple its estimate, making it the most expensive painting by a female artist of all time. A self-portrait by Frida Kahlo then sold for $34.9 million in 2021, and a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois went for $32.8 million in 2023. But it begged the question: does a female artist need to be dead to reach such heights? Not at all.
According to an Art Basel report released earlier this month, the top-selling contemporary female artist last year was the very much alive 93-year-old Yayoi Kusama. But recognition didn’t come early. “Kusama was in New York in the 1960s and used to work with the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Donald Judd. She knew Andy Warhol. She knew all of the heavy hitters of the time, but yet she left New York at the beginning of the 1970s as a complete unknown. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when you had this incredible coming through for artists such as Bourgeois, Kusama and Judy Chicago, that she started getting the attention she hadn’t achieved before,†says Baker. This year alone marked 11 major Kusama exhibitions, including one at the Tate Modern and Every Day I Pray for Love at the Victoria Miro Gallery, which ended earlier this month.
Last year, a major exhibition at the Royal Academy celebrated the work of the performance art pioneer Marina Abramović, and this autumn the 77-year-old opened her first exhibition in China at the Modern Art Museum of Shanghai. Joan Snyder, aged 84, recently joined Thaddaeus Ropac gallery and later this month will show Body & Soul, a new exhibition showcasing over six decades of the New Yorker’s work. Martha Jungwirth, also 84 and at Ropac, recently exhibited at the Guggenheim in Bilbao as well as opening the day and evening sales in October at Sotheby’s. The type of art in demand is also expanding. Barbara Kruger, aged 79, whose critically acclaimed 2024 show at the Serpentine featured installations, moving images and soundscapes (Barbara Chase-Riboud, 85, held a sculptural show, Infinite Folds, at the same gallery a year prior), is currently showing photography at the Hall Art Foundation in Vermont. Magdalene Odundo, aged 74, is showing ceramics at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London, and Michele Oka Doner, 79, debuts a series of new bronze body sculptures with the Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery in New York this November. Once relegated to the role of muse within art, women are now increasingly its instigators.
At the bedrock of all this creativity stands the collector. Valeria Napoleone, a patron and philanthropist of 30 years and the foremost collector of female artists in the world, said she was “aghast†at how sidelined female artists were when she began her journey in the mid-1990s. Despite the recent advances, she cautions against the artist “being seduced by money, success or being asked to create constant work for art fairsâ€, explaining that women artists who have been ignored for decades now have substantial bodies of work that are “real†and “uncontaminated†by the market – which is exactly the kind of work she gravitates towards. She is keen to point out, however, that this “choir of female voices†she collects are first and foremost about talent; they just happen to be women.
Still, in a male-dominated field, this stance was not without its challenges. “In my journey as a collector – a woman collector, and not a couple, collecting only female artists – you can imagine how much resistance and sarcasm I received,†she says pointedly. She wants museums to take on the responsibility of showcasing more female talent and would like to see more women featured in regional museums, where representation is still shockingly low. However, the likes of Fatima Hellberg, who will take the helm of the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in October 2025, Bettina Korek, CEO of the Serpentine Galleries since 2020, and Dr Mariët Westermann, the first female CEO of the Guggenheim, who was appointed just this summer, are leading the change.
How the art world facilitates the evolution of female talent, however, is continually up for debate. “I was also, for a long time, sceptical of exhibitions that just focused on ‘women’s art’ because that felt to me like placing women in a categorisation that men would not be subjected to,†muses Hambling from her South London studio. “But the older I get, and I look back and reflect, the more I realise that as a queer woman I have experienced prejudice. I applaud conscious efforts to address prejudice, so that one day, that ideal world where a work of art stands for itself might exist.â€
Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night is at Pallant House Gallery until 27 April 2025
