Beyond Form review: the dogged gunk rockers who besieged the art world – and the disco
Adrian Searle, The Guardian
February 2024
From Bridget Riley’s grids to Louise Bourgeois’s phallic bulges, this show is a glorious celebration of female abstract artists whose often-denigrated work now feels unstoppable.
The title belies the ambition and scope of an exhibition that sprawls into the 70s, and which encompasses body parts, formal rigour and weirdness, the mathematical, the political, the woven, the painted, the cast, the constructed, the handmade and the machine assisted. The lines of abstraction go every which way. As curator Flavia Frigeri says, there is no such thing as pure form. All the work here was made by women, many of whom were marginalised or even excluded from an art world that was predominantly male, white and straight, and during a period when feminism was slowly gathering pace. […]