For our first presentation at the London Art Fair 2025, we will dedicate our stand to an international group of 20th-century artists-women who worked in abstraction, bringing together works by artists from the UK, France, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. We will present works from the 1910s to the 1990s including various approaches to abstraction from Constructivism to Soviet Non-conformism, post-war British abstraction from London and St Ives and Lyrical Abstraction from the post-war New School of Paris. The presented artists are: Prunella Clough (1919-1999), Sandra Blow (1925-2006), Lydia Masterkova (1927-2008), Anna Staritsky (1908-1981), Jeanne Coppel (1896-1971), Liubov Popova (1889-1924), Nadezhda Udaltsova (1886-1961), Natalia Ivanova (1901-1979), Vera Pestel (1886-1962), Kathleen Guthrie (1905-1981) and Rosina Rogers (1918-2011).
By highlighting the artists-women from our collection, we want to shine a brighter light on their life and work. Some are famous, while others are known to few, and have largely been overlooked in the historical overviews, exhibitions, and collections of modern art. In staging an exhibition at London Art Fair 2025 that focuses solely on abstraction by artists- women, we are suggesting neither an essential femininity, nor a common theme that connects these works and informs their engagement with non-objective art. Rather, we want to show the diversity in the work of artists-women, to highlight their role as co-creators of the twentieth-century abstract and avant-garde movements, and to restate their importance within the history of modern art, which to this day appears to sideline its female protagonists.
To coincide with the exhibition at London Art Fair we are publishing a catalogue of the artists-women from the Quad Fine Art collection which will expand on and provide greater context to the themes explored in our fair presentation. Going beyond the selection presented at London Art Fair 2025, the catalogue features all the artists-women that are currently in the Quad Fine Art collection. The collection itself is the result of idiosyncratic collecting practices, as well as a keen and sustained interest in European and international modernism. The catalogue brings together a breadth of movements, genres and media, from constructivism to art naif, from representation to lyrical abstraction, and from collage to drawing, painting and beyond.
Please contact us if you would like to receive an invitation to the fair or a copy of the catalogue.
