Alternative stories: women, allegory and painting
Panel discussion
Wednesday 17 April 2024 6.30 - 7.45pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre | Burlington Gardens
£15/£9
Friends of the RA book first
Angelica Kauffman
Join our panel of artists and art historians for a conversation on myths, allegories, and the representation of women in painting.
Throughout art history, women have appeared in paintings as allegorical characters, often as tropes from religious or mythological sources from Eve to Medusa.
But alternative histories were also presented. Artists such as Angelica Kauffman foregrounded women as powerful characters, drawing on contemporary female creatives such as Emma Hart (Lady Hamilton) as inspiration for female 'types' in her history paintings. Now, contemporary artists are using mythology to reframe many of the traditional narratives associated with women.
In this discussion, our expert panel will discuss female characters in painting, and how artists working from Kauffman’s time to the present, have sought to subvert allegorical tropes.
About the speakers
Sutapa Biswas is an inter-disciplinary artist working across a range of media including painting, drawing, film, photography and installation. A conceptual artist, Biswas first came to prominence in the mid-1980s when she exhibited following graduation in the landmark exhibition ‘Thin Black Line’ curated by the artist Lubaina Himid (Turner Prize winner 2017). Biswas’ works are shaped by her observations about the relationships between people and the places they live in. She is especially interested in how larger historical narratives collide with personal narratives. Underpinned by an interest in colonial histories and how this relates to gender, race and class, her art is nuanced by the ways in which oral narratives reveal the human condition and their relationship to our collective histories and to questions of time and space.
Marina Warner writes fiction, criticism and cultural history. Her award-winning books explore myths, symbols and fairy tales, including Monuments and Maidens (1985) and From the Beast to the Blonde (1994). Forms of Enchantment (2018), her anthology of essays on artists, is out now in paperback. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and an Honorary Fellow of the RA.
Annette Wickham is Curator of Works on Paper for the Royal Academy Collection and co-curator of the current Angelica Kauffman exhibition. She has curated and contributed to numerous displays and exhibitions at the Academy including Daniel Maclise: The Waterloo Cartoon and Constable, Gainsborough and Turner and the Making of Landscape. Annette has published on aspects of the Royal Academy’s history, its Collections and its Schools. She studied History of Art at Manchester University and the Courtauld Institute and was previously an Assistant Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Chair: Sarah Turner is an art historian and Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She has published widely and co-curated several major exhibitions, including The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and, most recently, Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends at Kettle’s Yard. Much of her academic writing has focused on the entangled relationships between Britain, the British Empire and South Asia.