Female Voices

Ghada Amer, Monica Bonvicini, Claudia Comte,

Katharina Grosse, Shara Hughes, Melli Ink,

Christine Rebet, Jorinde Voigt, and more.

Grieder Contemporary is pleased to present "Female Voices" an exhibition comprised exclusively of female

contemporary artists. This exhibition showcases the works of a group of leading contemporary women artists with

very distinct approaches to art, who experiment with all types of artistic techniques and subject matter.

Women artists are still widely underrepresented in all aspects of the art world. This is a fact that will probably not

come as a surprise to anyone visiting this exhibition. Be it gallery representation, museum shows, grants, press

coverage or auction prices, female artists are far from having achieved equality in the art world, even if the

existence of a few female artist superstars sometimes makes us want to believe that.

Time and again, research has shown that this gap is still far from being closed. According to a survey made in 2019

by the news portal Swissinfo, during the period 2008-2018, in solo exhibitions in Swiss museums, only 26% of

artists were women, and only 10% of the museums surveyed had more individual shows with female artists than

men.

Nonetheless, even with this information in the background, the question as to whether women-only exhibitions

are still needed is an important and relevant one to discuss. Do these shows give women a visibility that will lead

to their fuller integration within a broader discourse? Or, rather, do they position women as outsiders, separate,

and forever unequal?

Opinions among curators and art scholars seem to be divided. Some argue that these exhibitions "challenge the

masculine assumptions of the sacred canon of history by reclaiming women artists and inserting them back into a

narrative from which they have been dismissed because they are female". Others say that these exhibitions

"unwittingly contribute to the marginalization of female artists by reducing the artwork’s value to its creator’s

gender and separating it from broader histories".

The exhibition "Female Voices" at Grieder Contemporary seeks, precisely, to address this debate, by gathering the

work of a group of artists that are either represented by the gallery, or with whom the gallery has worked in

previous exhibitions. While some of the works reference feminist topics such as the female gaze or gender

questions, many others are focused solely on formal questions such as abstraction or constructivism, thus making

it evident, that the female voice and the work of female artists comes in all shapes and forms. Contrary to what

binary gender roles have tried to make us believe, women‘s art is simply every kind of art.

Parallel to this reflection, the current exhibition also tries to highlight one of the biggest shortcomings of the art

world when it comes to female artists: their inclusion in permanent collections. As the Guerrilla Girls showed in

their 2017 Whitechapel exhibition Is it Even Worse In Europe? women’s artwork acquired in European museums

didn’t increase over time despite most institutions marketing their efforts to expand the canon. Institutions’ actual

commitment to inclusivity should be done through acquisitions since permanent collections are the ones shaping

public opinion and framing how history gets recorded for posterity.

For Grieder Contemporary, opening this exhibition during the Zürich Art Weekend and right before the art world

crowds move to Basel for the upcoming art fairs, was an opportunity to reflect about the role of collecting in

achieving more equality for women in the arts.