The Great Women Artists

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world renowned artist, Bharti Kher. Known for a seemingly limitless practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, found objects, and more; that explores hybrid beings – fusing animals and humans, objects and nature – Kher’s extraordinary art-making looks at and exists both in the real world and imaginary. She is astute at seeing the potential in something, whether it be the magical superpowers of the human body or extent to which she can push materials into something they’re not, transforming them into something full of wonder. From using bindis like tiny paint strokes, melted down bangles to form a tower of bricks, animal heads and or plant-like forms that transform a human from something real to into something mythical – looking at a Kher work is to see alchemy play out in a solid object. Born in England to Indian parents in 1969, Kher studied at Newcastle Polytechnic, before venturing to India, where she has lived since 1993. Settling in New Delhi, where she works in an almost fantastical four-story laboratory-like studio (+roof) that I was lucky enough to visit earlier this year, Kher has become one of the most celebrated artists in Asia, and beyond, exhibiting at institutions all over the world. Often taking the female body as a framework for her ideas – a form that, although prevalent in historical sculpture, has rarely been depicted by the female itself – Kher focuses on its multitudinous aspects. She adds leaves, horns and mannequins to show the many universes it contains, and to push against the rigidity of around who we are – as she has said, “what we are, how we function, what we do, where we sit, where we don’t sit.” Drawing on religion to mythology, womanhood and more, Kher’s works feel ancient, present, and futuristic and, in a time like today when we are looking to alternative stories away from the ones dominating our world, forever enchanting and enriching, guiding us to seeing how extraordinary beings can be. Her current exhibition, aptly titled Alchemies, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park brings together work from the last few decades, both small and colossal, and gets us to think about how the ultimate job of the artist is as an alchemist: someone who can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, see the myriad possibilities in a single medium, and show us something we instantly recognise despite never having witnessed it before… Kher's exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park! https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/bharti-kher?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADfc_iZaY34c9UpnqEXtFtVVvF0Pg&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2ZfABhDBARIsAHFTxGwcjlobrI69KMnQTB7ikxghVWdGF-6i2Ly8BM1VTYAYqjtAlSAsFnYaAo96EALw_wcB -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest, the esteemed art historian, Andrew Hottle, will be discussing SYLVIA SLEIGH! Currently the Professor of Art History at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, Hottle has dedicated his research and writing to focussing on women artists, with specialization in feminist art of the 1970s. He is the author of a definitive monograph on the American realist painter Shirley Gorelick, and his detailed book about The Sister Chapel reignited interest in a historic collaboration by thirteen women artists. But he is also a world expert on one of those artists featured in this chapel: Sylvia Sleigh, who was born in Wales and died in 2010, having been based in New York City for most of her life, and known for her unique realist painting style immortalising those in her community and the culturally significant. Identifiably recognisable by their meticulously rendered details, body hair and tan lines, Sleigh’s paintings were always created from her acutely feminist viewpoint. Painting seductively effeminate male nudes in poses that evoke Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or Ingres’s Turkish Bath, the Welsh-born artist – famed for her contribution to the Women’s Liberation Movement, as a prominent member of AIR Gallery – said of her work: “I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasised joy.” Although in my opinion far too overlooked for far too long, Sleigh is having somewhat of a renaissance. Earlier this year, Ortuzar Projects in NYC staged a solo exhibition of her work to acclaim – her first in 15 years, and this spring, she is showing alongside her contemporaries Alice Neel and Marcia Marcus, at Levy Gorvy Danyan in New York, that runs until 21 June: https://www.levygorvydayan.com/exhibitions/the-human-situation-marcia-marcus-alice-neel-sylvia-sleigh And it is very much thanks to Hottle, who is currently in the process of compiling her catalogue raisonne, as well as writing a book about the founder artist-members of SOHO 20, a historically significant feminist cooperative gallery, of which Sleigh was one, established in 1973, that she is finally coming back into the spotlight. -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the brilliant New York based painter, Katherine Bradford. Hailed for her luminous paintings of swimming pools and cosmic skies, ballet dancers and bicycle riders, Bradford takes us to imaginary worlds full of freedom, togetherness and wonder. Not usually specifying the figures in her work, instead she offers us a universal depiction of humanity – that any of us can apply ourselves or relate to – playing with scale and perspective, and getting us to think hard about our place on this earth. Born in 1942, and raised in Connecticut, Bradford didn’t always start off as an artist. A woman of stifling 1960s America, she was married with twins in her 20s, but aged 37, swapped this life, bringing her kids along, to become an artist in New York City, and never looked back. Making her way by teaching from the 1980s to the 2010s, becoming the senior critic on the faculty of Yale School of Art and being awarded Pollock Krasner grants and Guggenheim Fellowships, Bradford – although painting for decades – has received major recognition in the past decade, such as her recent survey show at the Portland Museum of Art. And thank goodness she carried on painting, because especially at a time like this, of despair and uncertainty, we can look to Bradford’s paintings for hope, visualisations of freedom that prioritise inclusiveness and community – as she has said: “It’s important to me to make upbeat paintings. If anything, I’m making paintings about enchantment.” Looking at Bradford’s painting is like being transported into another world, whether it be outer space or in cosmic waters, it’s like they are lit with a glow akin to a blanket of stars. There is nothing artificial about them: they are spellbinding, and her canvases become a springboard for the most magical scenes, an “intentional place for imagination” as she says “as they convey a personal universe of my own making, populated with characters who explore who we are, how we fit together visually, and how we all stand next to each other.” -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed painter, Rose Wylie! Born in 1934, as the youngest of seven children to Victorian parents, Wylie spent her early childhood in India before coming to England aged 5. This was in 1939, in the midst of a bomb-filled Second World War and increasingly fractured world. She went on to study figurative painting, at Folkestone and Dover College of Art in Kent from 1952–56, at a time when tutors would say to her ‘It’s no good bothering with you, you’re a girl, you’ll get married, have children and that’ll be that.’ … It was then to a teacher training programme at Goldsmiths before putting art aside to raise three children. This was, until 1979 when Wylie returned to the studio enrolling at the Royal College of Art, in her early 40s. Her first solo exhibition came a few years later in 1985, but despite Wylie working in her cottage-slash-studio in Kent for the last 50+ years – where we are very excitingly recording today – it was not until the last 10–15 years that her work has been given the attention and acclaim it has always deserved. Playful and fractured, featuring text overlaid with image, witnessing a Rose Wylie painting in person is to see the world in a different way. Wylie takes recognisable elements from pop culture, history, mythology, sport, even the Bible – from flowers, battenberg cakes, sportstars, queens, to the likes of Nicole Kidman and Emily Maitlis – and shows us them anew, in her paintings that are void of perspective to the point that there is no indication of where the work starts or ends. Her paintings are sometimes full of movement – like a football being kicked, almost balletically, with players, clad in yellow, darting across the dotty canvas that surrounds its viewer. At other times they remind me of a film playing out – like the blood-clad figure lying on the floor in Kill Bill – or even a script with stage directions featuring phrases like “getting dark” or “yellow” … Wylie’s paintings are full of decisions, ideas, and the more I look at them, the more her world opens up… Now 90 years old, after a celebrity-filled birthday bash, Wylie is back better than ever for her exhibition at David Zwirner London “When Found becomes Given”, opening on April 3rd, and I couldn’t be more delighted to be speaking to her at her Kent-based studio today. Exhibition: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2025/rose-wylie-when-found-becomes-given -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most renowned painters working in the world right now: Jenny Saville. Hailed for her at times colossal paintings of the human form – from close ups of the face, to examinations of exposed flesh – Saville is fascinated with the complex vessels that we all live inside. Theatrical and grotesque, beautiful and painful, her presentations of the body can feel almost like a landscape, pressed up against the surface of the canvas, in her masterful handling of paint that ranges from wet, to dry, oily to thin, thick and with shards and smears of colour. At once uneasy, raw, tense, and animal-like, Saville’s portrayals of the body show how it transforms, grows, decays, and breathes… While full of contradictions, there is always a beauty, from the colours Saville uses to the golden light and textures that accentuate a knee, or finger. Born in Cambridge in 1970, as one of four siblings, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the 80s and 90s, and spent her final year in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was exposed to a new set of American artists and feminist thought. In the 1990s, Saville quickly became one of the most anticipated painters challenging not just the medium of paint, or the depiction of the body, but reinventing the female nude or semi-nude body as a subject that has been entrenched in a male-gazed art history. Tackling Biblical and mythological narratives, referencing ancient Venus-like figures, as well as her own experience as a mother, Saville has constantly configured new ways of presenting the body, and in more recent years, has turned to stark, saturated colouring This year, she will open exhibitions at the Albertina, Vienna, her first major solo show in Austria; Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London – that will bring together 50 works – and will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, for us to see the incredible trajectory of an artist who keeps reinventing flesh with paint – and I can’t wait to find out more… LINKS! Albertina: https://www.albertina.at/en/exhibitions/jenny-saville/ NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/jenny-saville/?_gl=1*136gpph*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjwv_m-BhC4ARIsAIqNeBt-ZzQivw0289iG5mzsW59uEmn-IUiod6qXx6jVk9rOLTLV9trgo20aAiw7EALw_wcB -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

Sheila Heti, an acclaimed author known for her insightful explorations of art, grief, and motherhood, joins the discussion. They analyze iconic female artists like Berthe Morisot, reflecting on how their experiences shape artistic narratives. Heti emphasizes the profound impact of friendship on creativity and the evolving perception of everyday beauty in art. The conversation also touches on the intimate relationship between art and emotion, underscoring the significance of personal expression in challenging conventional norms.

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast today is the renowned British artist, Barbara Walker. Born in Birmingham, where she lives and works today, Walker is hailed for her intimate paintings of everyday life, and intricate drawings that not only show power dynamics in Old Master Paintings, but give voice to histories that are all too often erased. From works on paper to paintings on canvas, and large-scale charcoal wall drawings, Walker’s work, no matter their scale, is full of empathy, depth, and emotion. Some tell us stories about the state of affairs in Britain, whereas others are much more personal – in the early 2000s, she made her son the subject of her work – which get to the heart of the brokenness in our society, and look at situations from both an artistic and motherly gaze. Research is at the heart of Walker’s work, and she frequently goes into public archives, such as for her incredible series, Shock and Awe, which highlighted the contribution of Caribbean servicemen and women serving in the British Army from 1914 to the present day. As well as “Vanishing Point”, which so movingly – and powerfully – explores the visibility and invisibility of Black subjects in Western European collections in our museum collections. Drawing in the Black figures while obscuring the dominant white subjects, Walker encourages the viewer to consider other perspectives beyond the ones that have become the so-called ‘default’ in these institutions. But she is also interested in the unknown – as she says: As she says, “I'll go into archives looking for the backstories behind events, individuals or paintings, but I never know what I'm going to find. Making art is about curiosity and it's the same in the archive – I love playing in the unknown.” Very excitingly, a major survey of her work is currently on view at the Whitworth Museum in Manchester, in including her Turner Prize nominated group of portraits, Burden of Proof, a poignant response to the Windrush Scandal – and a newly commissioned printed wallpaper inspired by the Whitworth’s collection, that continues her representation of the Windrush generation. -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the world’s most renowned artists, Shahzia Sikander. Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and animation, the Lahore-born, New York-based Sikander is widely celebrated for her work that subverts tradition and reclaims narratives – such as her subverting of Central and South-Asian manuscript painting and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. A holder of a B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, it was Sikander’s breakthrough work, The Scroll, 1989–90, that received national critical acclaim in Pakistan and brought international recognition to the medium in contemporary art practices in the 1990s. Life then took her to the US, where she received, in 1995, her M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the subsequent twenty plus years, Sikander’s practice – which has expanded into multiple mediums – has been pivotal in showcasing art of the South Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition. Solo exhibitions include at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas; the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; accolades include the Pollock Prize for Creativity, a medal of Art by the U.S. Department of State, and a MacArthur Fellowship; she is in the collections of all major national and international museums, and she is currently an adjunct professor for Fall of 2024 at Columbia University, Sikander's major outdoor project, NOW, an 8-foot bronze female sculpture, is permanently installed on the roof of the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan. An accompanying 18-foot female sculpture, Witness, was exhibited in Madison Square Park in 2023, which then travelled to Houston – something we will get into later on in this episode. Her interdisciplinary practice, that has focussed on hybridised female figures that references goddesses from all different global perspectives, offers a perspective that breaks down all borders, disrupts assumptions around art historical boundaries. It is groundbreaking, trailblazing – and I can’t wait to find out more. -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the renowned German painter, Katharina Grosse. Hailed for her site-specific paintings which she spray-paints onto rocks, walls, landscapes and architecture, Grosse’s works explode with luminous colour. Working both indoor and outdoor, she upends all traditions when it comes to painting: dissolving framing devices, vantage points, or a clear indication of where a work begins and ends. Witness one of her all-engulfing work in person, and your perspective constantly shifts: from afar they feel like giant swathes of colour, but up close, details of the paint reveal themselves. Grosse is architect, sculptor and painter all at once. In her words, she aims to ‘reset’ what painting is and can be. But while she employs the artforms in the most imaginative and inventive ways, she also gets us to think about their histories and traditions – for example, how we could compare her work to an all-encompassing painted renaissance chapel in Florence, something that became apparent to her on a year abroad to Italy in her youth. Fascinated by colour and light since childhood, Grosse was raised at a pivotal moment in German history. Born in 1961 in Freiberg, West Germany, but often visited family in East Germany, she grew p in a post-Second World War society – when artists were grappling with the identity of German art. As a teen she studied in Cambridge in the UK, before completing her studies at the University of Fine Arts Müster and Fine Arts Dusseldorf. She then went to live in Marseille and Florence, where she was an artist in residence at the Villa Romana… Today, she lives and works in Berlin, and has gone onto have some of the most important, mind-expanding exhibitions of the 21st century – from a installation at the Venice Biennale in 2015, to transforming the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof; her Colossal takeover at Sydney’s Carriageworks and, for MoMA PS1, spray painting reds and whites on a former military site in the Rockaways. Today we meet her at her current exhibition at Gagosian in New York – titled Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips – where she is exhibiting an extraordinary collection of works that she calls Studio Paintings – and I can’t wait to find out more. -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most trailblazing artists and poets in the world right now, Cecilia Vicuna. Born in 1948 in Chile, and based between Santiago and New York, Vicuna is hailed for her works that are as ephemeral as they are permanent, colossal as they are minute, fragile as they are strong, that bring together sound, weaving, language, and community. Educated in Santiago in the 1960s, life took Vicuna to London to study at the Slade School of Art on a scholarship in the 1970s, but because of the Pinochet regime that began in 1973, she was forced to live in exile. Soon she went to Bogota, Colombia, before moving to New York City, where she has remained ever since, in the same loft and tending to the same community garden. Since Vicuna was a teen, she has focussed on a political orientation for her art, as she has said, because she “understood that the life of this planet was endangered”. Through artforms she calls “arte precario” – precarious art – because it disappears and is vulnerable, Vicuna has held up a poignant mirror to our world through her installations that meld twigs, bamboo, stones, and shredded textiles. While they show us its beauty, they also convey its vulnerability: warning us about what will happen if we don’t wake up in time to protect our ecosystems… At the heart of her art is language – specifically the quipu, which means knots in Quecha, a system of encoding information from the Andes – that conveys as much information as the alphabet – which was used for 5000 years, before being wiped out during colonisation… As well as the importance of togetherness. Because, in a world as destructive as ours we need more than ever to unite, to rebuild the planet for our future descendents, as she says, “not only for the survival of our species, but because it is joyful, fun, beautiful and delightful.” This November, I am excited to say that a new exhibition of Vicuna’s work will open at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NYC, featuring paintings that she has re-rendered from the 1970s, while on a trip to Bogota and Rio. Dazzling in hues of pinks and yellows, they explore the Yoruba Mythology that represents human or divine characteristics and concepts of nature, and I can’t wait to find out more. https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions –– THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Lauren Armstrong Carter Music by Ben Wetherfield