Trending: women artists to collect right now

Lisa Yuskavage

Born in 1962, the painter Lisa Yuskavage is best known for her cartoonish, erotically charged images of women. Her brazen explorations of desire, lust and sexuality have earned her a reputation as the ultimate provocateur, says Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary art specialist Emily Kaplan. ‘She delves into the human psyche to illuminate the complexity behind female sensuality, while her subject’s deformities prey on women’s fears about losing control over their bodies.’ 

She’s also hailed as a masterful colourist, deeply invested in the painting process. ‘She builds up the canvas surface with care and deliberation,’ says Kaplan. ‘It’s a technique that she shares with her revered contemporary, John Currin.’ 

In recent years critics have feted Yuskavage, and commercial success has followed. In March 2020, Big Blonde with Teacup (1994), a comparable painting to Heart  (above) depicting a thin-armed, big-breasted woman in an ethereal, single palette space, sold for $450,000 — more than double its low estimate. Christie’s holds the top price for the artist at auction.

Ruth Asawa

It is only since her death in 2013 — at the age of 87 — that Ruth Asawa’s work has truly begun to receive the global recognition it deserves. In April 2020 the United States Postal Service announced the release of a series of stamps featuring 10 of the artist’s signature brass and wire sculptures in recognition of her legacy. A few months later, a monumental hanging sculpture (circa 1953-54) sold for a staggering $5,382,500 in the ONE sale at Christie’s New York, setting a new world record for the artist at auction.

Born in rural California in 1926, Asawa studied at the experimental Black Mountain College under Josef Albers. She began with ink drawing before turning to sculpture in 1947, when she learnt how to weave baskets out of wire. She exhibited throughout the 1950s with New York’s Peridot Gallery, selling works to prestigious institutions and collectors alike. By the end of the decade, however, she had all but slipped into obscurity. 

Her reputation is on the rise again now, though. In addition to private collectors, high-profile museums are showing keen interest in her work. In 2019 she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis, the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work in more than a decade. Next year, the Modern Art Oxford will present Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe (30 Jan-9 May 2021), which will then tour to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum in Norway.

Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes matured with the ‘Eighties Generation’ of painters in Brazil, working in a figurative style only permissible after the fall of the country’s dictatorship in 1963. Her vibrant, colourful collages, prints, paintings and installations, often punctuated by a recurring set of arabesque motifs, draw on everything from opera and Brazilian popular music to colonial baroque architecture and carnival decoration.

‘I am seeking geometrical structures, but with freedom of form and imagery taken from different worlds,’ she once said.

She represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale, held in 2003, and has since been included in solo and group shows around the world — including a major and well-received exhibition currently open at São Paolo’s MASP. 

Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others. 

The market for her work remains as strong as ever: A Lua (1997) sold at auction in June for $608,000, nearly triple the low estimate. She is represented by White Cube and Pace Gallery.

Lynda Benglis

In the 1960s Minimalist art was sleek and male-dominated; Lynda Benglis, however, pioneered a new form of abstraction focused on materials in action. She became renowned for works created from liquid wax, latex and foam, poured directly onto gallery floors, where they hardened to form brightly coloured quasi-volcanic masses. 

The undulating forms that resulted are a nod to the feminist roots of Benglis’s practice, which has proved enormously influential in discussions about women in art. As MoMA curator Laura Hoptman comments: ‘Anybody who is using that bodily biomorphism is Benglis. Anybody who is being very out with her sexuality is Benglis.’

Metal sculptures such as Argonauta (above) echo these forms, and have attracted considerable interest at auction. In March 2020, a comparable gold leaf sculpture cruised past its high estimate of $60,000 before selling for $212,500. 

Elizabeth Murray

According to Kaplan, Elizabeth Murray’s bold abstract works featuring biomorphic forms, figures and everyday objects such as cups and pillows are enjoying an uptick in market interest. In November 2019, Little Fingers (2001) set a new world record for the artist at auction when it sold for $437,500, against a high estimate of $80,000.

Over the past four decades, Murray’s work has been the subject of more than 80 solo shows worldwide, including — most recently — Elizabeth Murray: Flying Blue at the Camden Art Centre  in London in 2019 and Spotlight on Elizabeth Murray  at Stanford University in 2018. In November 2020, Murray’s work will be included in a group exhibition celebrating contemporary women artists at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Kara Walker

The auction record for the American artist Kara Walker was set in June 2019, when Four Idioms on Negro Art #4 Primitivism  realised £395,250 at Christie’s in London. Just a few months later Walker made headlines again with Fons Americanus, a 13-metre high four-tiered working fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, which is currently installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

Fons Americanus  has garnered critical praise and brought a wider audience to her practice, buoying the already strong market for her work.

Frances Morris, Tate Modern’s director, told Christie’s in 2019 that Walker ‘fearlessly tackles some of the most complex issues we face today’. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Walker could prove to be a savvy investment. 

Her early work, which emerged in the 1980s in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, addressed shifting perspectives on sexuality and gender. Notably, Smith gravitated toward figuration, despite the art world’s long domination by abstraction and minimalism.

Since the early 1990s Smith has been increasingly interested in alternative narratives. Today, interest in her work remains as strong as ever. She is the subject of a retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich until 3 June 2018; in 2017 she was chosen by Christine Macel, chief curator at the Centre Pompidou, to participate in the Viva Arte Viva  exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale. Christie’s holds the top two prices for Smith’s work at auction.

Rachel Whiteread

A recent retrospective at Tate Britain shed fresh light on Rachel Whiteread’s practice and buoyed the already strong market for her sculptures. In October 2014, Untitled (Twenty-five spaces) — a cast in translucent amber, rose and citrine resin of the space beneath a group of chairs — realised £578,500 at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London, almost doubling its low estimate of £300,000.

For the past three decades, Whiteread has been casting what she refers to as ‘negatives spaces’ — everything from the innards of a hot-water bottle to the undersides of a table and the space surrounding a bath. In her formulation, the process of casting serves to elevate overlooked objects and transient spaces.

A key figure among the Young British Artists, Whiteread in 1993 became the first woman to win the Turner Prize. Also in that year she created perhaps her most renowned work: House, a cast of the inside of an East London house slated for demolition. House  became a potent symbol of the erosion of London communities when it was razed a mere 11 weeks after its completion. In 1997 her work featured in the Royal Academy’s seminal exhibition, Sensation, which brought the YBAs to prominence.

Carol Rama

Italian artist Carol Rama is known for her investigations into the fetishisation of the female form: the transgressive content of her first exhibition, in 1945, caused it to be shut down by the Turin police. 

It wasn’t until much later in her career, when she was in her seventies, that she would begin to garner critical attention, and it is only since her death in 2015 — at the age of 97 — that her work has truly begun to receive global recognition. A major show in 2017 at the New Museum in New York and the Palazzo Ca’ Nova in Venice brought her to a wider audience, with the artist’s top prices at auction being achieved in the past two years.

Kiki Smith

For more than three decades, American artist Kiki Smith’s multifaceted, multimedia practice has examined human nature from all angles. 

Rama’s work has been compared to that of her contemporary, Louise Bourgeois. In her art, she deploys a wealth of unconventional media to create ‘formless’ object-paintings that borrow heavily from her often traumatic life. Entirely self-taught, Rama selected her materials carefully, subverting them to project new interpretive diversions and unexpected imagery.

In later life she was the subject of a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and in 2003 received a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale.

Helen Marten

Although still in her early thirties, British artist Helen Marten has seen her works enter major international collections including Tate Britain; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; the Stedelijk, Amsterdam; and the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong. She has been shown at the Venice Biennale in both 2013 and 2015, and received both the Barbara Hepworth Prize for Sculpture and the Turner Prize in 2016. Marten was also the subject of successful solo shows at Sadie Coles in 2014 and the Sackler Serpentine in 2016.

Equally comfortable working in two and three dimensions, she employs a unique visual language drawn from literature, popular culture, folklore and fairytales. Marten’s works have been offered at auction on three occasions, and have sold for well above their high estimates.

Nan Goldin

Current interest in Nan Goldin’s work can partly be explained by her activism designed to shed light on the opiate epidemic in America. Following the publication of a highly personal essay on her battle with addiction in Artforum and her headline-grabbing protest at the Met in March 2018, Goldin’s profile has never been higher. Her work is currently featured in a host of group shows and exhibitions on photography, including art-historical shows such as Real Worlds: Brassai, Arbus, Goldin at the MOCA in Los Angeles.

News of Goldin’s collaboration with street-fashion label Supreme is helping to introduce her work to a younger generation. Christie’s holds seven of the top 10 prices for the artist at auction.

Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi was the sole female member of Forma 1, the influential post-war Italian group which called for the reconciliation of Marxist politics with abstract art. Throughout the 1950s Accardi reduced her palette to black and white to explore the relationship between figure and ground.

In the early 1960s, however, she began reintegrating colour into her work, and painting on transparent plastic. This phase of Accardi’s practice, which was celebrated in the Ambiente/Arte section of the 1976 Venice Biennale, would prove influential for the Arte Povera movement. In 2014, Verderossogiallonero (Greenredyellowblack), painted in 1967, sold for £170,500, more than twice its high estimate, at Christie’s in London.

In the early 1970s, together with art critic Carla Lonzi, Accardi became a founding member of the neo-feminist group Female Revolt  — only to quit when Lonzi ­decided that painting was itself a patriarchal activity. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, Triplice Tenda (Triple Tent), was held in 2001 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in New York. The following year, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris presented a retrospective of her work.

Julie Cockburn

Julie Cockburn deploys a range of techniques to transform found photographs into surreal, hybrid visions. A 2016 solo show at the Photographer’s Gallery in London was a critical success, and her work has entered collections including the Yale Center for British Art and the Wellcome Collection. In May 2017 Idyll 2012 sold for £5,250, almost three times its low estimate, at Christie’s in London.

In her practice, Cockburn embroiders mid-20th-century photographs with vividly coloured geometric patterns, or obliterates her subjects’ identities with kaleidoscopic optical illusions, generating a dialogue between gender and identity, the mass-produced and the delicately crafted. Yet it is an instinctive reaction to the objects she encounters, rather than an underlying intellectual or political agenda, that guides her approach. 

Rineke Djisktra

Having been the subject of a major 2012 retrospective organised by the Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Amsterdam-based photographer last year received the prestigious Hasselblad Award in recognition of the power of her images to ‘speak brilliantly to the intricacy of the portrait’.

In our First Open Online  sale, we are offering a work from her Park Portraits  series (2003-06), for which Dijkstra photographed adolescents in urban green spaces including Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Madrid’s El Parque del Retiro and Xiamen’s Amoy Botanical Garden.

Other works to look out for include photographs from her breakthrough Beaches series (1992-96) — provocative images of adolescent bathers in coastal locations across the United States and Europe — as well as her series on mothers in the moments after giving birth, bullfighters about to enter the arena, and images of an adolescent Bosnian refugee taken between 1994 and 2003.

Anja Niemi

Norwegian photographer Anja Niemi stages, shoots and performs in atmospheric solo scenes that interrogate the social construction of female identity. To date, her work has been acquired by the Nion McEvoy Collection, the Hudson Bay Company Global Art Collection, the Oslo City Council, and the Susanne von Meiss Collection. Her UK auction record was set in May 2017 at Christie’s when The Backyard 2014  sold for £5,250.

Exploring the boundary between the real and the imaginary, Niemi often adopts awkward and contorted poses and plays with different vantage points to highlight the divergence between what we choose to reveal in our daily lives and who we actually are. ‘We have a tendency to cover up our flaws and decay, hiding all the ugliness of life,’ she says. ‘I try to have a bit of humour about it.’