The best female sculptors you've never heard of
As we wait with baited breath for Rachel Whiteread's upcoming retrospective at Tate Britain, we round up five of the best female sculptors you've never heard of, but ultimately definitely should have
Ranging from figuration to abstraction and from amorphous to recognisable, Rebecca Warren's sculptures strike a bold new form for the female nude.
While the nude is one of the most traditional and classical subjects in art history, Warren uses her hefty thumb-imprinted unfired sculptures to subvert the expectations laid out by accepted masters of figurative sculpture including Degas, Picasso, and Rodin. Her sculptures are often crudely sexual in nature and they reference the body in challenging ways.
A majority of Warren’s oeuvre explores the relationship between thought, process, and authorship; her influences from classical literature, psychology and pop culture are renegotiated and reworked as they find three-dimensional form.
Warren was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006 and has recently been appointed Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has had solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery and is set to exhibit in the new Tate St Ives extension, opening on October 14 2017.
Image: Rebecca Warren’s, Come, Helga. © Rebecca Warren/Maureen Paley/PA
