Nancy Spero

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Artaud Paintings (Une Fatigue de commencement du monde), 1970

Nancy Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in the American Midwest. She studied in Chicago and Paris, where she lived from 1959 to 1964. In 1964 she went back to live in the United States, at a time when the country was at the height of its involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Shocked by the horrors of the war and the behaviour of the USA, Nancy Spero radicalised her artistic expression. Technically, she abandoned oil painting on canvas and substituted it with other techniques and materials (including gouache on paper, collage, writing, ancestral and mythological figures), and, her personal search for an expression of human tragedy, suffering and exploitation.

Indignant at the hegemony of the reigning artistic currents and the repressive male world, Spero stood aside from the Abstract Expressionist current launched in the US in the 40s, from Pop Art and from the Minimalism and Neo-minimalism of 1960-70, and developed a provocative personal artistic practice which expressed the range of existing individual freedoms, beginning with sexual freedom. Her unflagging commitment and struggle to give women artists a greater presence made her a leading figure of the feminist movements of the 90s. She is a member of the WAR (Women Artists Revolution) group and a founder member of the first women's art gallery, AIR.

In the series "Artaud Paintings," Nancy Spero echoes the writings of Antonin Artaud, creator of the Theatre of Cruelty, which embodies the concrete poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé within the experience of suffering as a work of the flesh. In Nancy Spero's words, "Artaud is exceptional for having made the most extreme expressions of dislocation and alienation of the 20th century. He represents himself as the supreme victim. Violent in gesture and language, he is both masochistic and passive… I identify with him in the sense of the victim, using his language to exemplify my loss of language, fracturing his already fractured text. Because I feel like a victim insofar as I am a woman and an artist, I use Artaud to explore victimisation (imaginary or real)."

The "Artaud Paintings" were done on loose sheets of white paper on which the arid, abstract empty spaces strike a contrast with the severe but impressive images. Their austerity heightens the pain and disconnection of the images in the work.