Some say Art Basel is becoming more and more like Fashion Week. The fashion industry is growing more enchanted with the iconic international art shows and there’s a variety of art and fashion collaborations. One that we are particularly excited about is Dior’s third installation of Dior Lady Art, which commissions artist to collaborate on the house’s famous Lady Dior bag. This year, for the first time ever, the 11 artists are all women.
“Why have there been no great women artists?” asked the slogan T-shirt that opened Maria Grazia Chiuri’s spring 2018 show for Dior.
The sentence was the title of the 1971 essay by art historian Linda Nochlin that explored obstacles that have prevented women from succeeding in the art world. Many of these hurdles still exist, but women artists couldn’t be more influential than they are now.
Who are these 11 women artists that Dior has commissioned? Let’s take a look:
1. Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality and gender.
2. Pae White is an American artist, who creates large-scale, mixed-media installations concerned with shifting associations of familiar objects. She currently lives and works in LA.
3. Polly Apfelbaum is an American artist primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as “fallen paintings.” She’s currently based in NYC.
4. Lee Bul is a Korean contemporary sculpture and installation artist who appeared on the art scene in the late 1980s. Her work questions patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women by revealing ideologies that permeate our cultural and political spheres.
5. Haruka Kojin is a Hiroshima-born artist, who completed her Master’s degree at the Department of Inter Media art at Tokyo University of the Arts. Her works explore the distortion of reality through changing the experience of the space with elements of different shapes, sizes and colors.
6. Morgane Tschiember is a French artist, based in Paris. She has directed her work from two- to three-dimensional pieces, in order to explore the transitions between dimensions, and how they relate to each other.
7. Li Shurui has been hailed as a leading emerging female Chinese artist by The New York Times and International Herald Tribune and is one of the few women to hold solo shows in China’s commercial art galleries. She is exploring in a wide range of media the relationship between space and light, with painting and installation.
8. Janaina Tschape is a German artist, throughout her twenty-plus year career Tschäpe’s multidisciplinary body of work has encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video and sculpture.In her practice, Tschäpe often incorporates themes of aquatic, plant and human life to suggest dreamlike, abstract landscapes that blur perceptions of illusion and reality.
9. Isabelle Cornaro is a French artist. Her work employs painting, sculpture, installation, and film in her quest to challenge the way viewers perceive art objects. Her multimedia works orchestrate careful juxtapositions that pay tribute to and reinvent traditional modes of representation.
10. Burcak Bingol is a Turkish artist, currently based in Istanbul. Her works explore notions of belonging, cultural heritage, identity, decoration and failure by blurring the boundaries between these seemingly distinct notions.
11. Olga de Amaral is a Colombian visual artist known for her large-scale abstract works made with fibers and covered in gold and or silver leaf. Amaral’s work is deeply driven by her exploration of Colombian culture and her own identity. Architecture, mathematics, landscape, and socio-cultural dichotomies in Colombia are woven together through the use of fiber.
