NVSBLS

Invisibles is an exhibition project that uncovers the work of ten women artists throughout the history of art. These women, like many others in different disciplines, have been hidden and forgotten in the canonical narrative until, in the 1970s, historians such as the American Linda Nochlin, wondered why women artists did not appear in art books.

Since then, research on the subject has only grown. In the last decade, numerous publications on women artists have been produced in Spain. One of the first was Ellas mismas, by the Asturian writer and art historian Ángeles Caso, published in 2016.

At the same time, many museums and art centres have committed themselves to reviewing, researching and including the work of women artists and their gaze in their collections and exhibitions.

Detail from ‘Venus and Mars’ (1595), by Lavinia Fontana. Oil on canvas (currently in the Casa De Alba Foundation’s Liria Palace, Madrid. The work was attributed to Veronese until 2007. Lavinia Fontana was the first woman to work in the mythological genre and to depict a female nude.

Invisibles is based on this idea of recovering the feminist genealogy of art. Thus, in a room with bare walls, inhabited only by small markers, the public has to unravel the works through the use of a tablet, the only way to (re)discover the work and the artist behind it. An exercise that, thanks to technology, allows the visitor to enter into the works with an extraordinary degree of precision, being able to appreciate brushstrokes, textures and details that are not perceptible on a conventional visit to an art centre.

In this way, with this gesture, the visitor is assimilated to art historians who, in recent decades, have had to question the great classic manuals – deserts of women’s names – in order to broaden their historiographical and documentary horizons in a deliberate act of new research, with the aim of rediscovering them and returning them to their rightful place.

Invisibles wants to contribute to this task by proposing an exhibition in which technology is the indispensable tool to show what would otherwise not be visible.

Original idea: Héctor F. Lasheras Díez

Curated by: Begoña Torre Miguel

Artists: En o Ende, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Clara Peeters, Artemisia Gentileschi, Luisa Roldán “La Roldana”, Rosa Bonheur, Camille Claudel, Janet Sobel, Maruja Mallo.

Graphic design: Claudia F. da Fonseca Mestre

Digital development: Adolfo Lombardero Vega

Programming: Gonzalo Pintos Cuesta

Photographic credits:

This exhibition is produced by the Instituto Tecnológico de Barredo (INTEBA) with the support of the Ministry of Culture.