Nancy Spero #3

Nancy Spero, Maypole/Take No Prisoners in progress. Studio of Nancy Spero, 2007.

"....
Nancy Spero’s studio comprises the entire floor of a loft in Greenwich Village, a deep space divided only by a partition that once separated her working space from that of her late husband’s, the painter Leon Golub (1922-2004). As I entered Spero’s studio to see what she was working on for the upcoming Venice Biennale, I glimpsed the borderline defining her space and Leon’s old painting space which had remained empty since his death in August 2004, except for the looming presence of his mural-scale painting, Gigantomachy II (1965). Nailed into the brick wall, the scarred raw linen surface of Gigantomachy II seethes with a tangle of brutish, wretched bodies, Olympian gods and giants, battling to the death for dominance.

On Spero’s side of the studio, long work tables nudged end-to-end are piled with stacks of cut-out female figures of different sizes, hand-printed, with lush as well as muted colors, on delicate papers. These “paper dolls,” as Spero calls them, are a part of her cast of female characters whose images she culls and reworks from many sources –from her own paintings as well as art books and magazines. They are the artist’s cross-cultural iconography of the histories and mythologies representing women from pre-history to the present, waiting to be collaged on painted and printed sheets of hand-made paper.
...." (bron: Cultural Politics, tekst: Deborah Frizzell)














Nancy Spero and assistant in her studio. Production stills from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 4 episode, "Protest," 2007. (bron: Art21)