Helen Chadwick: In the kitchen

1 January - 29 February 2020

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Helen CHADWICK, In the Kitchen (Stove), 1977
Helen Chadwick was one of Britain's most prominent and most provocative contemporary artists. Her work has become increasingly known since the mid-seventies for challenging stereotyped perceptions of the body in elegant yet unconventional forms.

Binary oppositions was a strong theme in Chadwick's work; seductive/repulsive, male/female, organic/man-made. Her combinations "emphasise yet simultaneously dissolve the contrasts between them. Her gender representations forge a sense of ambiguity and a disquieting sexuality blurring the boundaries of ourselves as singular and stable beings."

Included in this online exhibition are works from Chadwick's series 'In the Kitchen', with a number of new editions released especially for the show.
Considered seminal in the history of Feminist art, 'In the Kitchen' is one of Helen Chadwick's most provocative works. Originally conceived as a performance, it was first staged in 1977 at London’s Chelsea College of Art, where Chadwick studied for her MA. The performance featured the artist and three other female performers dressed in costumes that represented 'gendered' kitchen appliances: an oven, refrigerator, washing machine and kitchen sink.

This series of prints, made after the artist's untimely death in 1996, show Chadwick dressed in the four costumes, confronting and satirising the stereotype of women as domestic goddess or household slave.
Helen Chadwick embraced the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the 'normal' and 'traditional' in art historical pedagogy. Considered a 'mother' to the YBAs through her teaching posts at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art and the London Institute, her experiments with material were innovative and unconventional and captured a world in a state of flux.

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987 her work is included in the Arts Council Collection; British Council Collection; Tate Collection; National Portrait Gallery; Victoria & Albert Museum and MoMA, NY, amongst many others.

Chadwick's career abruptly ended in 1996, when she died at the age of 42 after catching a virus infection from from a laboratory whilst researching for a new work on genes.
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