For a long time, a painting by Jessica Etchells hung in Rochdale Art Gallery was presumed to have been painted by her brother, artist and architect Frederick Etchells. Jessica, born in Stockport in 1892, had studied at art school, moved to London and worked both for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop and, later, Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre. It was only in 1980 that the painting was identified as being her work. Now, this lowering still life hangs next to two works by the American artist Sherrie Levine – one is a photograph titled Untitled (After Walker Evans), the other a drawing “After” Henri Matisse. The Matisse is a direct, watercolour copy of a Matisse drawing, while Levine’s photograph reproduces a famous Walker Evans, rephotographed by Levine from a catalogue of the late photographer’s work.
Levine’s appropriations of Matisse and Evans are plays on authorship and originality, and on the supposed singular vision of the male artist. There is something poignant about the juxtaposition of Levine and Etchells. There’s a lesson here, retold and expanded in Herstory, an exhibition of work, all by women artists, combining loans to Rochdale by the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection in Turin, and works from the museum’s own collection.
Rochdale (the gallery was renamed Touchstones in the 1990s) has a minuscule exhibition budget, and these major loans by Italian art collector and philanthropist Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo to an institution, in what the Arts Council of England calls a “cold spot” for arts provision and participation, give the Lancashire gallery a major lift.
Featuring works from the 1970s to the present, Herstory is an often surprising, touching and occasionally alarming exhibition. American photographer Catherine Opie’s 1994 self-portrait has her in the most conventional pose imaginable – seated, hands clasped, facing the camera: except her face is hidden in a leather mask and collar and the word Pervert is tattooed, with decorative flurries, above her naked breasts. Precise rows of needles pierce both her arms, from shoulder to wrist. The stillness of this image, in which Opie is somehow at once both objectified and self-possessed, passive and aggressively confrontational, is a kind of bomb in the gallery, a BDSM queering of conventional portraiture. Across the gallery, Shirin Neshat’s portrait of a woman in a chador points a revolver at the viewer. Her exposed skin in the photograph has been over-drawn with fragments of poetry in Farsi script. Made almost 25 years ago, this image has accumulated unforseen power in the last quarter-century.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
