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NEW YORK. FRANCESCA WOODMAN, the most comprehensive exhibition of the

artist’s work since Woodman’s untimely death in 1981 at the age of 22, will be on

view at the Guggenheim Museum from March 16 through June 13, 2012.

Spanning the breadth of her production, the exhibition includes more than 120

vintage photographs, artist books, and a selection of recently discovered and

rarely seen short videos, presenting a historical reconsideration of Woodman’s

brief but extraordinary career.

Francesca Woodman is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

(SFMOMA). The exhibition has been curated by Corey Keller, Associate Curator of

Photography, SFMOMA, where it opened in November 2011. The New York

presentation of Francesca Woodman is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior

Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The Leadership Committee for 2012 Exhibitions of Photography is gratefully

acknowledged. Woodman’s oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular

exploration of the human body in space and of the genre of self-portraiture in

particular. Her interest in female subjectivity, seriality, Conceptualist practice, and

photography’s relationship to both literature and performance are also the

hallmarks of the heady moment in American photography during which she came

of age. This retrospective offers an occasion to examine more closely the

maturation and expression of a highly subjective and coherent artistic vision. It

also presents an important and timely opportunity to reassess the critical

developments that took place in the 1970s in American photography.

Born in 1958 into a family of artists, Woodman began photographing at the age of

thirteen. By the time she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in

1975, she was already an accomplished artist with a remarkably mature and

focused approach to her work. During her time at RISD, she spent a year in

Rome, a place she had visited as a child, and which proved to be a fertile source

of inspiration. After completing her degree, she moved to New York, where she

continued to photograph. While making several large-scale personal projects,

she also experimented with fashion photography, engaging in the age-old artist’s

struggle to reconcile making art and making a living. In 1981, at the age of twenty-

two, she committed suicide. Woodman’s tragic death is underscored by the

startlingly compelling, complex, and artistically resolved body of work she

produced during her short lifetime.

Woodman’s favorite subject was herself. From the very first time she picked up a

camera, she used it to thoroughly plumb the genre of self-portraiture. Using a

square-format camera, Woodman photographed her body in a variety of spaces.

She had an affinity for decaying and decrepit interiors, particularly the richly

layered surfaces of walls covered with graffiti or peeling wallpaper. In these

settings the body is evanescent, appearing and disappearing behind objects,

pressed into cupboards and cabinets, camouflaged against walls, or dissolving

into a blur of movement. She frequently included objects within the frame-gloves,

eels, mirrors-thereby investing them with a symbolic charge, and often making

deliberate allusions to tropes from the Surrealist and gothic fiction she admired.

The presentation at the Guggenheim will comprise approximately 120 vintage

photographs, including Woodman’s earliest student experiments at RISD, work

from her time spent studying in Rome, her forays into fashion photography upon

moving to New York, and the late, large-scale blueprint studies of caryatid-like

figures for the ambitious Temple project (1980). The exhibition will include two of

her artist books-diaristic collages of her own photographs and writings-which

were an important form of expression, particularly at the end of her career.

Woodman also experimented with moving images; six recently discovered and

rarely seen short videos will be presented in the exhibition.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. In addition to

beautifully reproduced plates including images never before published, this 224-

page book includes an introduction and essay by Corey Keller, which

contextualizes Woodman’s photography within the emergence of a new

photographic avant-garde in the 1970s and offers a compelling argument for why

a consideration of her work is urgent today. A contribution by Julia Bryan-Wilson,

associate professor of art history at the University of California, Berkeley, puts

Woodman and her initial reception by feminist scholars-in particular, Abigail

Solomon-Godeau and Rosalind Krauss-in perspective. An essay by Jennifer

Blessing focuses on Woodman’s videos and explores the relationship between

the still and moving image in her body of work. The hardcover catalogue is $49.95

and will soon be available at guggenheimstore.org.