Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Hannah Wilke: Drawings and Performalist Self-Portraits, its third solo exhibition of the late American artist.

A pioneering figure in feminist art, Wilke explored issues of beauty, gender, and Western cultural conventions through a multidisciplinary practice that included photography, performance, video, sculpture, and drawing. Among the first artists to reclaim and challenge the traditional male gaze, Wilke transformed representations of the female body into acts of celebration and self-determination. Aligning herself with the women’s movement of the 1960s, her work merged Post-Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and second-wave feminism, establishing her as one of the most influential—yet historically underrecognized—artists of the late twentieth century.

Drawing was central to Wilke’s practice from its earliest stages. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, her works on paper explored the physical and conceptual ideas that would emerge in her sculpture and performance. Through undulating lines, exuberant shapes, and fluid compositions, her drawings move between figurative suggestion and abstracted landscape. Organic forms—often echoing bodily imagery—intertwine with arrows, loops, and gestural marks that suggest motion, energy, and transformation.

Executed in charcoal, pastel, watercolor, and pencil on paper and card, many of these early works reference the body by merging yonic and phallic shapes embedded in biomorphic or floral components. Wilke described her aim as creating “a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract,” noting that the content of her work always related to her own body and feelings—reflecting pleasure as well as pain, and the complexity of emotion. The imagery that later appeared in her terracotta, latex, and chewing-gum sculptures appear as fluid abstractions, asserting the beauty and power of the female body while resisting its objectification. Wilke's drawings reveal an artist developing a visual language through which the personal, political, and corporeal become inseparable.

In an adjacent gallery, photographs from the series So Help Me Hannah and Intra-Venus explore Wilke's focus on the female body and its power and implications in a more direct manner.  A series of naked self-portraits printed in black and white draws on popular images of femininity as the artist performs exaggerated gestures and poses.  Using her own body as the subject, Wilke both embraces and critiques the seductive visual language often used to objectify women. Wilke coined the term “Performalist Self-Portraits” for these photographs of herself taken by others at her direction, rejecting the traditional role of female model for male photographers.  In Untitled, (So Help Me Hannah series), 1978, Wilke holds a pistol in her hand and crouches beneath a staircase.  This cinematic work plays with humor and irony to question human relations, how female identity and beauty are constructed and consumed in mass culture, and to confront Claes Oldenberg for whom she had collected ray guns when they were together.