Rethinking the Gesture: Painting Gender and Materiality after de Kooning

In the 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, painting and in particular women painters took on a prominent role. For the first time in its history the Venice Biennale included a majority of women and gender non-conforming artists (Alemani, 2022). This, it could be argued reflects a turning towards a (new) generation of women painters who make visible themes and spaces within their respective practices that address ideas of queer identity, women’s rights and the representation of the female body. These practices rethink a hierarchical history, opening up new spaces for exploration and representation within painting practice.
These new and gendered spaces of painting rethink and rework historical moments offering expanded narratives and expanded positions. This paper will bring into focus, the painted gesture, the autographic mark synonymous with Abstract Expressionism and in turn offer alternative readings and meaning in the work of key contemporary women painters to include Christina Quarles, Jade Fadojutimi and my own painting practice. Key to this positioning is a recent essay by feminist art historian Fionna Barber who writes of the gesture being ‘cut loose’ from its historical positioning and masculine associations to occupy a new and expanded positioning in the work of painter Cecily Brown (Barber, 2020). In my paper I aim is to unravel hierarchical and patriarchal language around painting methodologies from within the studio. This in turn becomes a way in which we can begin to articulate the triangulation of painting, gender and materiality as an expanded space of painting and as a feminist painting methodology.