Nancy Spero
Artists Against Apartheid Poster- signed and dated, 1984
Print in perfect condition. Spero’s often radical work made strong statements against war, male …
A leading figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960s, Nancy Spero explored female sexuality, suffering, and heroism, as well as the horrors of war, in gouache and ink works on paper. Spero drew from ancient mythologies and iconographies to produce her burlesque cast of pagan goddesses, Celtic fertility figures, and Amazon warriors, which she pulled from books on ancient art before manipulating and incorporating them into her own drawings and collages. Her well-known 1966–70 “War” series, produced during the Vietnam years, explored the atrocities of war, a subject Spero revisited in her later career with frieze-like drawings installed around the walls of galleries, depicting masses of screaming figures and helicopters overhead dropping human-shaped bombs. Her work Cri de Coeur (2005) portrays mourning women from ancient Egypt. “I am thinking about the women’s condition, showing victimage or celebratory sexuality in an exaggerated way,” she once said. Spero was married to the late artist Leon Golub, and was a founding member of the feminist A.I.R. gallery, started in 1972.
Print in perfect condition. Spero’s often radical work made strong statements against war, male dominance and abuses of power, presenting compelling arguments for tolerance and a non-hierarchical society. The artist always viewed art as inseparable from life and, from this, developed a distinctive kind of political …
A leading figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960s, Nancy Spero explored female sexuality, suffering, and heroism, as well as the horrors of war, in gouache and ink works on paper. Spero drew from ancient mythologies and iconographies to produce her burlesque cast of pagan goddesses, Celtic fertility figures, and Amazon warriors, which she pulled from books on ancient art before manipulating and incorporating them into her own drawings and collages. Her well-known 1966–70 “War” series, produced during the Vietnam years, explored the atrocities of war, a subject Spero revisited in her later career with frieze-like drawings installed around the walls of galleries, depicting masses of screaming figures and helicopters overhead dropping human-shaped bombs. Her work Cri de Coeur (2005) portrays mourning women from ancient Egypt. “I am thinking about the women’s condition, showing victimage or celebratory sexuality in an exaggerated way,” she once said. Spero was married to the late artist Leon Golub, and was a founding member of the feminist A.I.R. gallery, started in 1972.
