Two paintings by Auckland artist Jacqueline Fahey have been included in Wack!, a critically-acclaimed exhibition of international feminist art now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Image: Christine in the Pantry (detail), one of two paintings by NZ artist Jacqueline Fahey included in Wack.Two paintings by Auckland artist Jacqueline Fahey have been included in Wack!, a critically-acclaimed exhibition of international feminist art now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Image: Christine in the Pantry (detail), one of two paintings by NZ artist Jacqueline Fahey included in Wack.Curator Cornelia Butler explains, "My ambition for Wack! is to make the case that feminism's impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international 'movement' of any during the postwar period."

New York Times critic Holland Cotter writes in response, "One thing is certain: Feminist art, which emerged in the 1960s with the women's movement, is the formative art of the last four decades. Scan the most innovative work, by both men and women, done during that time, and you'll find feminism's activist, expansionist, pluralist trace. Without it identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all."

119 artists are surveyed in Wack! and most are represented by work made in the 1970s.

The two Jacqueline Fahey paintings included are Christine in the Pantry, 1972 (Collection of Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru), and Sisters Communing, 1974 (Hocken Collection, University of Otago).

The Wack! catalogue describes Fahey as "stand[ing] out among her contemporaries in New Zealand because of her involvement in social and political issues. Unlike many painters of her generation who worked in landscape or upheld abstraction and the self-referential modernist creed, Fahey's commitment to figurative work as a means of commenting on contemporary concerns has remained constant throughout her career.

"In her exploration of women's experience and analysis of female-identity, social and artistic mythologies, Fahey, like other feminist artists of her generation, prefigured many of the aims of the women's art movement in New Zealand.

"Whatever limits female experience imposes, Fahey turns toward advantage in paintings of domestic life. In Christine in the Pantry (1972), Fahey portrayed Christine Massey in Fahey's own Auckland kitchen; the portrait shows the 18-year-old amid domestic clutter, perhaps suggesting the budding independence of a young woman despite her parents' disappointment in her decision to dress as a 'hippie'.

"Fahey has described the home as 'the battlefield of the psyche' and likened it to a stage where a gamut of human emotions, comedies, and tragedies is privately enacted."

25/6/07