VIENNA.- Radical! launches a lively dialogue between over sixty women*artists from more than twenty countries, with paintings presented alongside textile designs, sculptures alongside prints, drawings alongside photographs and films. Regardless of their background or aesthetic idiom, all these artists are united by their search for new forms of expression and representation and by their determination to shift artistic and social boundaries.


✨ Empower art news! Help ArtDaily continue its mission. Click to donate via PayPal or join our community on Patreon.


General Director Stella Rollig: With Radical! we are giving women and gender-diverse artists their rightful place in the Modernist canon, drawing attention to their systematic marginalization, and reevaluating art historical narratives. The project challenges the notion of a linear sequence of avant-gardes and extricates the presented women*artists from the traditional art historical classifications that have contributed to them being forgotten and omitted from museum collections.


👗 From painting to fashion, discover Sonia Delaunay's boundless creativity! Browse her inspiring books on Amazon.


Instead of perpetuating stylistic pigeonholes, the exhibition foregrounds the individuality of each artist’s work, thereby acknowledging the true artistic spectrum that ranges from abstract to figurative, from critical to activistic. What makes these approaches radical is not just the way in which they question social and artistic conventions, but mainly the tenacity with which the women*artists—often in the face of resistance—went their own way and accepted the inherent risk in doing so. Many of their subjects are just as relevant today as they were a century ago.

Curator Stephanie Auer: The exhibition brings together women*artists who led self-determined lives—which was unusual for the time—and who held their own in a patriarchal world order. Their works are acts of emancipation, testaments to the changes in traditional gender roles. These women*artists championed the right to bodily autonomy, rendered visible social injustices, and protested anti-Semitism and racism. In abstraction they found an aesthetic idiom in which the artist’s background or gender is immaterial.

Women*artists of Classical Modernism are—with few exceptions—still considered marginal phenomena whose works are always assessed in comparison with those of their male contemporaries. Radical! presents the pioneering creative output of women*artists in the early twentieth century and follows six decades of feminist curatorial practice. This new perspective lets us see beyond the Eurocentric view of Modernism.

Radical! features works by Zubeida Agha, Gertrud Arndt, Benedetta, Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Elizabeth Catlett, Sonia Delaunay, Inji Efflatoun, Alexandra Exter, Leonor Fini, Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, Hannah Höch, Erika Giovanna Klien, Katarzyna Kobro, Käthe Kollwitz, Lotte Laserstein, Tamara de Lempicka, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Jeanne Mammen, Marlow Moss, Alice Neel, Anton Prinner, Gazbia Sirry, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Charley Toorop, Madiha Umar, Fahrelnissa Zeid, and many more.

The show Radical! Women*Artists and Modernism 1910–1950 was developed in cooperation with the Museum Arnhem and the Saarlandmuseum – Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken.

In this exhibition “women*artists” is used as an inclusive term that encompasses a range of gender identities.


Artdaily participates in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. These commissions help us continue curating and sharing the art world’s latest news, stories, and resources with our readers.