URBAN GUIDE

This summer Villa Arson sets its sights on the Californian art scene via the little-known early years of a great feminist artist.

She co-founded Womanhouse, one of the first experiments in feminist art in Los Angeles in 1972, and made a lasting impression with Dinner Party, an installation created between 1974 and 1979 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, celebrating historical and mythical women through a protean banquet with 39 place settings. But before this there was Judy Gerowitz starting out. Villa Arson looks back on the blossoming of this leading artist at the junction of key movements: Pop Art, Light and Space, Hard-edge, Minimalism. From the 1960s on, Judy Chicago worked tirelessly in her LA studio, contributing to the exciting experimentations of California’s Cool School and developing her art along the lines of Finish Fetish, the Californian vernacular pop art using materials such as acrylic glass, vinyl and polyester. This exhibition invites us into her Feather Room first created in 1967, an incredible installation in which the angles of the room and all external references are erased by surrounding visitors with lightweight white tarpaulins and piling the floor with white feathers. “I wanted to create a feminine environment, soft and protective,” explained Chicago, unarguably architectural in her thinking. Having explored an explicitly erotic iconography – e.g. the sexualised Car Hood series – she then rapidly made a name for herself in minimal art: coloured blocks, cubes and cylinders sometimes large enough to walk around and through, sometimes miniaturised. In this ambitious exhibition, curator Géraldine Gourbe also presents the work of other West Coast artists who shared Chicago’s experimentations during the Cool Years, so shedding new light on that particular art scene and Californian minimalism in general.

Jusqu’au 4 novembre
Nice, 20 avenue Stephen Liegeard
Tél. 04 92 07 73 73
www.villa-arson.org