Investigating formations of gender and sexuality in the avant-gardes: interventionist art history and scholarly curation

The works presented as part of this PhD have taken place in my activities working with artists estates, preserving their studios, working on scholarly inventories of archives, curating and publishing, with a focus on women artists who started their practice in the 1960s and 1970s. I subsequently expanded my interest in the pioneering practices of women artists and the complex configurations of gender and sexuality in the inter- and postwar (neo)avant-gardes such as Surrealism and the constructive-concrete art movements.

My practice developed reciprocally across these various activities, with a longstanding commitment to the artists and estates I represented. I subsequently had the opportunity to dedicate exhibitions to these artists in my roles as museums (Curator at Kunsthalle Basel and Curator at Large at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland) and independent curator, as well as numerous institutional catalogue texts and magazine articles.

I focused my investigations on the recontextualisation of women avant-gardists whose work had been under-recognised in the narratives of hegemonic art history. My curatorial strategies, as well as my writing, were informed by intense phases of dedicated research facilitated through my primary access to the artists’ studios and archives for extended periods. My access to several artists’ estates gave me new and privileged insights into the work and social conditions of these artists.

This expert research provided the base for my curation informed by newly formed scholarship providing original and ground-breaking exhibition concepts. My authorial interventions complicated and altered the perception and evaluation of these artists pioneering achievements, as well as the face of genre and style definitions and further impacted critical revisions in art institutions worldwide. Through these contributions, I critically intervened into the hegemonic art historical and museal discourse of the art movements.