Victoria Miro presents a selection of a 100 photographs taken from this extensive overview of the artist’s career that comprises of an archive of around 800 photographs created between the early 1970s to 1981. The exhibition includes previously unseen photographs, including some rare colour prints, alongside photographs from Boulder, Colorado; Providence, Rhode Island; Rome; MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire and New York.
Francesca Woodman made her first photographic works at the early age of thirteen and from the beginning her body was both the subject and object in her work, showing it in various stages of transformation, deformation, alteration and effacement. The very first photograph taken by Woodman, Self-portrait at Thirteen (1972), shows the artist sitting at the end of a sofa in an un-indentified space, wearing a oversized jumper and jeans, arm loosely hanging on the armrest, her face obscured by a curtain of hair and the foreground blurred by sudden movement, one hand holding a cable linked to the camera. In this first image the main characteristics at the core of Woodman’s short career are clearly visible, her focus on the relationship with her body as both the object of the gaze and the acting subject behind the camera.
17 November 2010 – 22 January 2011
Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW
