Gina Pane

Foster, Stephen and Collier, Caroline (2001) Gina Pane.

Abstract

This winter, the John Hansard Gallery launches the first UK solo exhibition of the hugely influential French artist, Gina Pane who lived and worked in Paris until her death in 1990. The exhibition is accompanied by the first English language publications about her work, and includes specially commissioned essays by Anne Tronche, Jennifer Blessing and Bernard Blistène.

Building on the Gallery’s 1999 exhibition Lie of the Land, which showed Pane alongside, amongst others, Ana Mendieta, Dennis Oppenheim, Bill Viola and Marina Abramovic, this project offers timely access to a broader range of work from the artist’s archive, French National and Regional Art collections and private lenders. By concentrating upon work from various stages in Pane’s career, the exhibition examines the relationship between her practice as a painter, sculptor, installation artist and performance artist.

Some of the pieces on display, such as Azione Sentimentale (1973), include the photographic documentation of performances in which Pane is seen to enact carefully planned and deliberately controlled self-wounding. In these works, Pane explores the relationship between mark-making on the body and scarring of the landscape, and seeks to demonstrate both the extreme fragility of the body and the reality of suffering. In conjunction with this, the subject matter and symbolic gestures featured in many of her pieces articulate her engagement in late 1960s feminism, identity politics and environmentalism. Whilst such works established Pane’s reputation as a seminal artist of feminist practice and performance during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, her legacy for contemporary art practice has become more urgent, making an exhibition of this key historical figure ever more timely

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