Lifetime. Mature Women in the Arts

How often do we actually see older women in art, on television, on stage or on the movie screen? For many years, older female actresses and musicians have talked about how roles disappear once the women advance in age, or how opportunities to perform fail to manifest, as soon as aging starts to show. At the same time, there is an alarming increase in the number of women who undertake cosmetic surgery or other interventions, to conceal evidence of aging.

Despite a focus on the representation of women in recent years, one aspect remains overlooked: aging. The exhibition “Lifetime: Mature Women in Art” builds further on the re-examination of the Modern Breakthrough’s women artists and tells the story about, what happened once they became old. The exhibition demonstrates how aging, and especially the older women artists themselves, seldom received the same level of recognition and respect as they enjoyed as young women artists. Therefore, this exhibition centers on both the artists’ lives and their aesthetic of aging, offering a more nuanced art historical narrative about aging and gender.

The exhibition illuminates a generation of women artists, who gained both the right to vote and admission to the Art Academy, but who nonetheless struggled against society’s preoccupation with beautiful, young women’s bodies, even as they witnessed the aging of their own female bodies. The exhibition features works by, among others, Anna Ancher, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, Bertha Wegmann, Anna E. Munch, Olivia Holm-Møller, Marie Sandholt and Susette Holten née Skovgaard. Their works depict the women’s body, that has become older, with empathy, value, and often, as still active.

The exhibition is based on the concept of the U.S. art historian Alice M. Rudy Price, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Anna Ancher. It is accompanied by a research-based catalog with contributions by Alice Price, Carina Rech, Marie Laulund, Yvette Brackman and Pernille Rom Bruun. After Ribe, the exhibition moves to Skovgaard Museet in Viborg (10.oct.26-7.feb.27) and then to Bornholms Kunstmuseum (8.mar.26-26.sept.27).

The exhibition is funded by: Ny Carlsbergfondet, Augustinus Fonden, William Demant Fonden, A.P. Møller Fonden, Beckett-Fonden, Hoffmann og Husmans Fond, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond