About
I want my pictures to have a certain timeless, personal but allegorical quality like they do in say ingres [sic] history paintings, but I like the rough edge that photography gives a nude.
—Francesca Woodman
Over a career that spanned less than a decade, Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) created a body of work that has proven uniquely influential on contemporary photography. She explored self-revelation and theatricality, questioning her medium’s capacity to invest representation with narrative and allegorical elements. Frequently taking herself as a subject, Woodman also pictured other models, both female and male. She often worked serially, producing both individual prints and artist’s books. Woodman was drawn to the symbolic aspects of the female nude, the timeless and entropic qualities of dilapidated interiors, and natural settings. She regularly placed mirrors, vitrines, and other objects within her tableaux, positioning them in relation to figures to suggest metamorphosis and paradox.
Born in Boulder, Colorado, to artists George and Betty Woodman, Woodman grew up in Colorado and near Florence, Italy, and attended high school in Massachusetts and Colorado. She made her first mature work, Self-portrait at 13, in 1972, in which she obscures her face while foregrounding the camera’s cable release.
Much of Woodman’s oeuvre dates from her years at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, which she attended from 1975 to 1978, spending time in 1977–78 in Rome through RISD’s honors program. While in Rome, Woodman had a solo exhibition in 1978 at Libreria Maldoror, a bookstore and gallery she frequented that championed avant-garde art and literature, and she was included in a group exhibition at Galleria Ugo Ferranti the same year.
Photo: Douglas Prince
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Fairs, Events & Announcements
Tour
Francesca Woodman
With Lissa McClure and Katarina Jerinic
Friday, April 26, 2024, 10am
Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York
Join Gagosian for a tour of the exhibition Francesca Woodman at Gagosian, New York, led by Lissa McClure and Katarina Jerinic, executive director and collections curator, respectively, at the Woodman Family Foundation. The pair will guide visitors through the presentation of over fifty prints from approximately 1975 through 1980, in which Woodman situated herself and others within dilapidated interiors and ancient architecture to compose her tableaux. Using objects such as chairs and plinths along with architectural elements including doorways, walls, and windows, she staged contrasts with the performative presence of the figures, presenting the body itself as sculpture.
Installation view, Francesca Woodman, Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, March 13–April 27, 2024. Artwork © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Owen Conway
In Conversation
Brooke Holmes, Katarina Jerinic, Lissa McClure
On Francesca Woodman
Wednesday, April 17, 2024, 6:30pm
Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York
Join Gagosian for a conversation inside the exhibition Francesca Woodman at Gagosian, New York, between Brooke Holmes, professor of Classics at Princeton University, and Lissa McClure and Katarina Jerinic, executive director and collections curator, respectively, at the Woodman Family Foundation. The trio will discuss Woodman’s preoccupation with classical themes and archetypes, her exploration of the body as sculpture, and her development of photography’s capacity to invest representation with allegory and metaphor. The exhibition features more than fifty lifetime prints—many of which have not been previously exhibited—including Blueprint for a Temple (II) (1980), the largest work she accomplished.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, c. 1977–78 © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In Conversation
On Francesca Woodman
Claire Marie Healy, Katarina Jerinic, Magdalene Keaney
Monday, March 18, 2024, 6:30pm
Hatchards, Piccadilly, London
hatchards.co.uk
Join Hatchards to celebrate Francesca Woodman: The Artist’s Books, published in association with the Woodman Family Foundation. All eight of Woodman’s unique artist’s books are reproduced for the first time in one comprehensive volume, including two that have never before been seen. Writer and editor Claire Marie Healy; Katarina Jerinic, collections curator at the Woodman Family Foundation; and Magdalene Keaney, curator of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In at the National Portrait Gallery, London, will consider how Woodman’s transformation of found volumes demonstrates a sophisticated relationship to narrative and sequence and offers a new understanding of the scope of her engagement with the book form. The trio will also discuss the images used to create the artist’s books that are on view at Gagosian, Burlington Arcade, London, from March 18 to April 6, 2024. Published by MACK, the book will be available for purchase at the event.
Francesca Woodman: The Artist’s Books (London: MACK, 2023)
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron
Portraits to Dream In
Through June 16, 2024
National Portrait Gallery, London
www.npg.org.uk
Photographers Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) and Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) lived a century apart—Cameron working in the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka from the 1860s onwards, and Woodman in the United States and Italy from the 1970s. Both women explored portraiture, going beyond its ability to record appearance, and using their own creativity and imagination to suggest notions of beauty, symbolism, transformation, and storytelling. Showcasing more than 150 rare vintage prints, this exhibition presents an overview of both artists’ careers, and suggests new ways both to look at their work and to examine how photographic portraiture was created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–78 © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Francesca Woodman in
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology
October 5, 2023–January 14, 2024
Barbican Centre, London
www.barbican.org.uk
RE/SISTERS features selections from approximately fifty emerging and established international women and gender nonconforming artists working across the fields of photography and film. The exhibition explores the relationship between gender and ecology, highlighting the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet. Spanning a range of themes, from extractive industries to the politics of care, the works on view address the existing power structures that threaten our increasingly precarious ecosystem. Work by Francesca Woodman is included.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Newport, Rhode Island, 1976 © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Francesca Woodman in
The Performative Self-Portrait
May 13–November 12, 2023
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
risdmuseum.org
The Performative Self-Portrait explores the body as material and medium and photography as a vehicle with which to consider the ways that artists use self-portraiture to enact the self, question history, and articulate identity. Made between 1930 and the present, the exhibited photographs include both new acquisitions and older works on view for the first time. Work by Francesca Woodman is included.
Francesca Woodman, Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Francesca Woodman in
The Rose
July 29–October 28, 2023
Lumbar Room, Portland, Oregon
www.lumberroom.com
The group exhibition The Rose, titled in homage to Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting of the same name, presents work by forty-four artists, from the 1960s to the present, to propose a circular genealogy of collage. The show imagines an extended family of artworks in which kinship is forged through association, to amplify themes, provide context through similarity and difference, and explore feelings and language as a collective effort. Work by Francesca Woodman is included.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, c. 1977–78 © Woodman Family Foundation/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York