David Benrimon Fine Art is pleased to announce our November exhibition, A Female Perspective. The show will present a selection of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by a diverse collection of women artists. This group show highlights the unique viewpoint that is considered through women’s art from renowned artists Helen Frankenthaler and Yayoi Kusama, to rising talent Ángeles Agrela and Jenny Morgan. Many of the women in the show are contemporary artists who have gained inspiration from their female predecessors. The exhibition celebrates the persistence of women in a field that is still heavily dominated by men. A Female Perspective explores the connection between these women and the artistic movements that they contributed to.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) is widely known as one of the great American abstract artists and has been celebrated worldwide for decades. She was exhibited in major international shows as early as 1959, and won first prize at the Premiere Biennale de Paris that same year. Frankenthaler has been featured in numerous solo museum exhibitions and her works have made millions at auction. We are pleased to show two small scale works by the artist that display her mastery of color field and her revolutionary technique.

Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) combined her love of landscape with her abstract painting style. Drexler, while involved in the New York art scene early in her career, retreated to Maine for the remainder of her life and has only recently been recognized to her full potential in the art market. Nonetheless, her works have now sold upwards of 7 figures, and are gaining major attention by collectors and institutions. Her work on paper Untitled (Purple/Brown/Yellow) exemplifies the artists’ style of small repetitive brush strokes.

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is a prolific artist whose “dots” style has become one of the most highly recognizable artists in the world. In this exhibition we have the pleasure of showing Kusama’s work across three mediums: sculpture, painting and print. Kusama has been open about her hallucinations, which started as early as ten years old, in which she saw light, auras, and dense fields of dots. By harnessing her struggles with mental health, Kusama successfully created an iconic alter-ego, bringing viewers into her brilliant subconscious. The Dots painting is a brilliant example of the motif that is omnipresent in all of her works.

Ángeles Agrela (b. 1966) executes hyper-realistic portraiture in large-scale acrylic and colored-pencils on paper. The Spanish artist abstracts her female subject with luminous, larger-than-life hair. She explores the cultural and historical importance of women's hair, and puts her contemporary twist on the theme in vibrant colors and braids. Her works have been featured in numerous exhibitions in Spain, Italy, and Austria.

Genieve Figgis (b. 1972) creates haunted portraits inspired by historical artworks and themes. She uses rich colors and drips of paint to skew the faces of the characters in her works that give the idyllic settings a dystopian appearance. As seen in Portrait, a woman poses in a classical Victorian manner even as her face is indiscernible and her green skirts mimic the trees behind her. Figgis’ work is influenced by her upbringing in the Catholic church, Rococo style, as well as the Irish countryside, where she currently resides today.

Andrea Marie Breiling (b. 1979) is a contemporary artist who works with spray paint as her dominant medium. Her inventive abstract paintings create movement and deep layers on the canvas. In Hannah Baby, Breiling layers her paint in a technique that emulates an iridescence and complexity to the canvas.

Ayako Rokkaku (b. 1982) is a self-taught artist globally admired for her cartoonish paintings of girls floating against abstract, rainbow backgrounds. Rokkaku paints on various materials - ranging from cardboard to Louis Vuitton luggage- with her bare hands which gives a raw, flat edge to her characters. ARP09-024, explores her common themes, such as the freedom and exuberant energy of childhood, through her use of kawaii imagery and a multicolor neon palette.

Jenny Morgan (b.1982) is known for her ephemeral nude portraits that become abstracted through layers of gestural washes and ombre colors. Resolution, the artist’s first self portrait after several years, holds an eerie eye contact with the viewer even as her face is blurred, and further intensifies the gaze as a floating eye in the background stares on. Morgan mostly has friends and family pose for her paintings as she values the added meaning of intimacy in her work, which mainly explores themes of death and rebirth.

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983) creates a seamless physicality with her use of 3D-esque geometric shapes that reference the human body. Themes such as sexuality, pregnancy, and birth are extensively investigated through a color-saturated, abstract lens, as Hollowell exposes the artistic embodiment of the female experience. Hollowell’s masterful use of symmetry in Linked Lingams in Yellow and Purple anchors on a central axis, relating not only to the body’s center of gravity, but also that of the natural world. “Lingam” is defined as a symbol for a divine, generative energy, specifically a phallic object worshiped as a symbol of Shiva, the Hindu goddess. Here, two “lingams” are interlaced, swirling around a red, burning center.