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Curated by Hettie Judah
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"A goddess confronts patriarchy: she is naked and magnificent; he a great serpent, phallic, coiled, bejewelled. She looks apt to bite."
- Hettie Judah
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Alexis HUNTER
A Goddess confronting Patriarchy, 1983Etching38 x 56 cmEdition of 24£ 960.00
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With gallery doors closed due to the recent lockdown brought on by COVID-19, it is satisfying to picture Alexis HUNTER's rowdy, seductive output in such proximity to London's long-awaited Artemisia Gentileschi show. "If you bury yourself in Artemisia's golden folds, you know she really loved painting1," Hunter observed after her own return to painting in the 1980s. Artemisia was one of the influences she cited as a painter, together with Fragonard, Monet and Goya2, so she was shy, apparently, neither of pleasure, nor horror.
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After moving to London in 1972, Hunter worked with photography, often in series resembling animation cells or picture stories. She hoped to engage an audience beyond the artworld hardcore by co-opting the aesthetic devices of advertising and women’s magazine as a vehicle for feminist theory. Sex, violence, and the threat of sexually violence were themes she returned to: even before Hunter rediscovered the pleasure of painting, the fantasy of lavish bloodshed that Artemisia composed for her muscular heroines must have felt thrilling.
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Alexis HUNTER
Goddess Harnessing Muse, 1983Linocut39 x 28 cmEdition of 60£ 960.00
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Money Art Sex. How problematic. How attention grabbing. Hunter used the title for a lecture at the LSE in 1993: like so much of her work, it was punchy but far from simple. “One aspect of my populism was to make images that appealed to the part of the brain that snaps to attention on seeing the fetish – the mother’s shoes and the fur for instance – and danger – fire, sharp objects, cracks, blood […] the important thing was to get people to look at the work in the first place,” she explained in 19973.
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Hunter really was interested in the relationship between money, art and sex – how art used sex to generate money, how money dictated how sex manifested in art, how this patriarchal power dynamic persisted in advertising, Hollywood cinema, and glossy women’s magazines. After exploring it through photography and film in the 1970s, in her painting and printmaking Hunter followed the power dynamic further, back to European myths, and the creation stories of New Zealand.
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Alexis HUNTER
Tits and Bums, 1986Ink and photo-collage mounted on paper, vintage29.8 x 20.9 cm£ 8,500.00
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Hunter’s new mythology – her cosmopolitan pantheon of goddesses, muses, devils and beasts – evolved as an act of re-telling, or perhaps an exorcism. Her destabilised mythic power structures are expressed in chimerical creatures – their bodies composed of multiple species – that she described representing "inner human conflicts, just as artists fantasized about the unknown in Medieval times4."
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1. Artist's Statement, Camden Town (1982) cited in Elizabeth Eastmond's Alexis Hunter: Fears/ Dreams/ Desires (1989)
2. Catalogue for the British Council exhibition Fantasy (1994)3. Interview with John Roberts in The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-76 (Camerawords, 1997) cited in Alexis Hunter: Radical Feminism in the 1970s (Norwich Gallery, 2006)
4. Catalogue for the British Council exhibition Fantasy (1994)
Text by Hettie Judah.
Alexis HUNTER: Money Art Sex: Part 1: A Godess confronting Patriarchy
Past viewing_room