Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories

Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories, a solo presentation of vintage photographs by Francesca Woodman, many of which have never been seen.  

This presentation will be a departure from past exhibitions of the artist’s work, drawing on newly available vintage prints and archival material provided by the Woodman Family Foundation which offer a fresh glimpse into the varied thought processes, interests, and influences that motivated Woodman’s picture-making.

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All Images Courtesy of Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery
© Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021.

Woodman’s photographs fuse compositional focus and technical mastery with her deep knowledge of literature and art history. In her grant application from 1980, Woodman reflects on her practice: “My early interest in literature followed me to Art school and the greatest influences on my work have been the writings of André Breton, specifically “Nadja” which is composed of some rather random photographs are expanded into the plot of the story, Collette and Zola. I feel [that] photographs can either document and record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: Places for the viewer to dream in…”

An enigmatic set of images from Italy, 1978, depicts the artist in an unknown crumbling space, where the distinction between inside and outside has been lost. Caught in a reverie, with a stream of branches above her, she is set against this ruined building with the edge of a smile on her face. In the next, she is enveloped by a vegetal wall, with only her clasped hands revealing her presence. There is something fable-like about these images, the protagonist caught between a dreamscape and decomposing world.

In the pair of prints Horizontale and Verticale, taken in 1976 while she was at Rhode Island School of Design, Woodman uses herself as material under the pretext of compositional studies. In the first, with a nod to Hans Bellmer, her legs tightly bound with ribbon, flesh bulging from its constraints, the direction of the bindings complicated by the diagonal construction of the rug beneath her; in the other, Francesca’s own tights hold the vertical lines; her blurred left-hand disrupting the vertical reading of the image. The images point to their own construction, and to the specific formal concerns she addressed while wryly commenting on the presentation of female bodies in the history of art.

“I use nudes partely [sic] in an ironic sense like classical painting nudes. 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. I like watching the immidiacy [sic] of a photograph struggle with “timeless imagery” the way it does in say a pictorialist photograph” Woodman later wrote of her general approach. Woodman’s prescient fusion of subject and object in her photographs empowered a dynamic freedom and positive affirmation of the body in space, an expression at once serious, playful and transformative. Her interest in formal possibilities and texture of space, and how to affect appearance and disappearance within such spaces was a ripe area of exploration. "I am interested,” she writes, “in the way people relate to space. The best way to do this is to depict their interactions to the boundaries of these spaces."  

 “There's no doubt that Woodman was interested in the formal possibilities and texture of space-years later, she'd write in her diary, 'I am interested in the way people relate to space. The best way to do this is to depict their interactions to the boundaries of these spaces' - yet she must have also worked hard to create the theatrical excitement of this photograph. The image suggests a magic theater of incongruous carnival tricks. The viewer confronts an intriguing paradox of eroticized formalism.”

 - Chris Kraus, Impure Alchemy, 2021

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was born into a family of artists in Colorado, and lived in Boulder, CO; Providence, RI; Antella and Rome, Italy; and New York City, until her death in 1981. Much of Woodman’s work was produced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975-1978. From 1977-78, Woodman lived in Rome as part of the RISD European Honors Program. She moved to the East Village in New York City in 1979, and was a fellow at MacDowell Colony in 1980. During her lifetime, Woodman had solo exhibitions at Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, 1976; Woods-Gerry Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 1978; and Liberia Maldoror, Rome, 1978 and was included in group exhibitions at Galleria Ugo Ferranti, Rome, 1978 and the Alternative Museum, New York City, 1980, among others.

The first in-depth, critical assessment of her work was organized by Ann Gabhart at Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, MA in 1986, and was seen at Hunter College Art Gallery, New York, traveling to Boulder, Irvine, and Champlain, Il. A catalogue accompanied the exhibition, which includes influential early essays by Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. A show at the Shedhalle Zurich in 1992 toured to Muenster, Stockholm, Helsinki; Berlin, and Norway; and in 2000 a solo exhibition was organized by Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. A comprehensive show introducing her photographs to a wider public was organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris in 1998, and travelled to Rotterdam; Lisbon; London; Barcelona; Milan; Dublin; and Madrid.