The Great Women Artists

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world renowned artist, Bharti Kher.

Known for a seemingly limitless practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, found objects, and more; that explores hybrid beings fusing animals and humans, objects and nature Khers extraordinary art-making looks at and exists both in the real world and imaginary. She is astute at seeing the potential in something, whether it be the magical superpowers of the human body or extent to which she can push materials into something theyre not, transforming them into something full of wonder. From using bindis like tiny paint strokes, melted down bangles to form a tower of bricks, animal heads and or plant-like forms that transform a human from something real to into something mythical looking at a Kher work is to see alchemy play out in a solid object.

Born in England to Indian parents in 1969, Kher studied at Newcastle Polytechnic, before venturing to India, where she has lived since 1993. Settling in New Delhi, where she works in an almost fantastical four-story laboratory-like studio (+roof) that I was lucky enough to visit earlier this year, Kher has become one of the most celebrated artists in Asia, and beyond, exhibiting at institutions all over the world.

Often taking the female body as a framework for her ideas a form that, although prevalent in historical sculpture, has rarely been depicted by the female itself Kher focuses on its multitudinous aspects. She adds leaves, horns and mannequins to show the many universes it contains, and to push against the rigidity of around who we are as she has said, what we are, how we function, what we do, where we sit, where we dont sit.

Drawing on religion to mythology, womanhood and more, Khers works feel ancient, present, and futuristic and, in a time like today when we are looking to alternative stories away from the ones dominating our world, forever enchanting and enriching, guiding us to seeing how extraordinary beings can be. Her current exhibition, aptly titled Alchemies, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park brings together work from the last few decades, both small and colossal, and gets us to think about how the ultimate job of the artist is as an alchemist: someone who can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, see the myriad possibilities in a single medium, and show us something we instantly recognise despite never having witnessed it before

Kher's exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park! https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/bharti-kher?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADfc_iZaY34c9UpnqEXtFtVVvF0Pg&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2ZfABhDBARIsAHFTxGwcjlobrI69KMnQTB7ikxghVWdGF-6i2Ly8BM1VTYAYqjtAlSAsFnYaAo96EALw_wcB

--

THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest, the esteemed art historian, Andrew Hottle, will be discussing SYLVIA SLEIGH!

Currently the Professor of Art History at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, Hottle has dedicated his research and writing to focussing on women artists, with specialization in feminist art of the 1970s.

He is the author of a definitive monograph on the American realist painter Shirley Gorelick, and his detailed book about The Sister Chapel reignited interest in a historic collaboration by thirteen women artists.

But he is also a world expert on one of those artists featured in this chapel: Sylvia Sleigh, who was born in Wales and died in 2010, having been based in New York City for most of her life, and known for her unique realist painting style immortalising those in her community and the culturally significant. Identifiably recognisable by their meticulously rendered details, body hair and tan lines, Sleigh’s paintings were always created from her acutely feminist viewpoint. Painting seductively effeminate male nudes in poses that evoke Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or Ingres’s Turkish Bath, the Welsh-born artist – famed for her contribution to the Women’s Liberation Movement, as a prominent member of AIR Gallery – said of her work: “I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasised joy.”

Although in my opinion far too overlooked for far too long, Sleigh is having somewhat of a renaissance. Earlier this year, Ortuzar Projects in NYC staged a solo exhibition of her work to acclaim – her first in 15 years, and this spring, she is showing alongside her contemporaries Alice Neel and Marcia Marcus, at Levy Gorvy Danyan in New York, that runs until 21 June: https://www.levygorvydayan.com/exhibitions/the-human-situation-marcia-marcus-alice-neel-sylvia-sleigh

And it is very much thanks to Hottle, who is currently in the process of compiling her catalogue raisonne, as well as writing a book about the founder artist-members of SOHO 20, a historically significant feminist cooperative gallery, of which Sleigh was one, established in 1973, that she is finally coming back into the spotlight.

--

THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the brilliant New York based painter, Katherine Bradford.

Hailed for her luminous paintings of swimming pools and cosmic skies, ballet dancers and bicycle riders, Bradford takes us to imaginary worlds full of freedom, togetherness and wonder. Not usually specifying the figures in her work, instead she offers us a universal depiction of humanity – that any of us can apply ourselves or relate to – playing with scale and perspective, and getting us to think hard about our place on this earth.

Born in 1942, and raised in Connecticut, Bradford didn’t always start off as an artist. A woman of stifling 1960s America, she was married with twins in her 20s, but aged 37, swapped this life, bringing her kids along, to become an artist in New York City, and never looked back.

Making her way by teaching from the 1980s to the 2010s, becoming the senior critic on the faculty of Yale School of Art and being awarded Pollock Krasner grants and Guggenheim Fellowships, Bradford – although painting for decades – has received major recognition in the past decade, such as her recent survey show at the Portland Museum of Art.

And thank goodness she carried on painting, because especially at a time like this, of despair and uncertainty, we can look to Bradford’s paintings for hope, visualisations of freedom that prioritise inclusiveness and community – as she has said: “It’s important to me to make upbeat paintings. If anything, I’m making paintings about enchantment.”

Looking at Bradford’s painting is like being transported into another world, whether it be outer space or in cosmic waters, it’s like they are lit with a glow akin to a blanket of stars. There is nothing artificial about them: they are spellbinding, and her canvases become a springboard for the most magical scenes, an “intentional place for imagination” as she says “as they convey a personal universe of my own making, populated with characters who explore who we are, how we fit together visually, and how we all stand next to each other.”

--

THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed painter, Rose Wylie!

Born in 1934, as the youngest of seven children to Victorian parents, Wylie spent her early childhood in India before coming to England aged 5. This was in 1939, in the midst of a bomb-filled Second World War and increasingly fractured world. She went on to study figurative painting, at Folkestone and Dover College of Art in Kent from 1952–56, at a time when tutors would say to her ‘It’s no good bothering with you, you’re a girl, you’ll get married, have children and that’ll be that.’ … It was then to a teacher training programme at Goldsmiths before putting art aside to raise three children. This was, until 1979 when Wylie returned to the studio enrolling at the Royal College of Art, in her early 40s.

Her first solo exhibition came a few years later in 1985, but despite Wylie working in her cottage-slash-studio in Kent for the last 50+ years – where we are very excitingly recording today – it was not until the last 10–15 years that her work has been given the attention and acclaim it has always deserved.

Playful and fractured, featuring text overlaid with image, witnessing a Rose Wylie painting in person is to see the world in a different way. Wylie takes recognisable elements from pop culture, history, mythology, sport, even the Bible – from flowers, battenberg cakes, sportstars, queens, to the likes of Nicole Kidman and Emily Maitlis – and shows us them anew, in her paintings that are void of perspective to the point that there is no indication of where the work starts or ends.

Her paintings are sometimes full of movement – like a football being kicked, almost balletically, with players, clad in yellow, darting across the dotty canvas that surrounds its viewer. At other times they remind me of a film playing out – like the blood-clad figure lying on the floor in Kill Bill – or even a script with stage directions featuring phrases like “getting dark” or “yellow” … Wylie’s paintings are full of decisions, ideas, and the more I look at them, the more her world opens up…

Now 90 years old, after a celebrity-filled birthday bash, Wylie is back better than ever for her exhibition at David Zwirner London “When Found becomes Given”, opening on April 3rd, and I couldn’t be more delighted to be speaking to her at her Kent-based studio today.

Exhibition: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2025/rose-wylie-when-found-becomes-given

--

THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most renowned painters working in the world right now: Jenny Saville.

Hailed for her at times colossal paintings of the human form – from close ups of the face, to examinations of exposed flesh – Saville is fascinated with the complex vessels that we all live inside. Theatrical and grotesque, beautiful and painful, her presentations of the body can feel almost like a landscape, pressed up against the surface of the canvas, in her masterful handling of paint that ranges from wet, to dry, oily to thin, thick and with shards and smears of colour.

At once uneasy, raw, tense, and animal-like, Saville’s portrayals of the body show how it transforms, grows, decays, and breathes… While full of contradictions, there is always a beauty, from the colours Saville uses to the golden light and textures that accentuate a knee, or finger.

Born in Cambridge in 1970, as one of four siblings, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the 80s and 90s, and spent her final year in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was exposed to a new set of American artists and feminist thought. In the 1990s, Saville quickly became one of the most anticipated painters challenging not just the medium of paint, or the depiction of the body, but reinventing the female nude or semi-nude body as a subject that has been entrenched in a male-gazed art history.

Tackling Biblical and mythological narratives, referencing ancient Venus-like figures, as well as her own experience as a mother, Saville has constantly configured new ways of presenting the body, and in more recent years, has turned to stark, saturated colouring

This year, she will open exhibitions at the Albertina, Vienna, her first major solo show in Austria; Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London – that will bring together 50 works – and will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, for us to see the incredible trajectory of an artist who keeps reinventing flesh with paint – and I can’t wait to find out more…

LINKS! Albertina: https://www.albertina.at/en/exhibitions/jenny-saville/ NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/jenny-saville/?_gl=1*136gpph*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjwv_m-BhC4ARIsAIqNeBt-ZzQivw0289iG5mzsW59uEmn-IUiod6qXx6jVk9rOLTLV9trgo20aAiw7EALw_wcB

--

THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield