“Strong women intent on doing their own thing are like magnets for me, I gravitate towards them and their work without even realising it,” says Alison Jacques. The Fitzrovia gallerist has established herself among the most prominent international galleries to focus on repositioning female artists overlooked in the canon of art history. When it comes to the art market, she is the queen of old ladies. Thanks to her, many previously under-the-radar artists are being given major international shows, including Brazilian painter and installation artist Lygia Clark at the Guggenheim Bilbao this autumn; textural artist Sheila Hicks at the Hepworth Wakefield next year; and Slovakian sculptor Maria Bartuszová at Tate Modern next November. Working directly with women in the later stages of their careers, or posthumously with their families and estates, Jacques has a superlative eye, and a tenacity that’s inspiring. She began carving her niche in 2007, three years after opening her eponymous gallery space, with the American performance artist and sculptor Hannah Wilke, known for her pieces exploring sexuality, femininity, and reclaiming the female body from the male gaze. “It was difficult to find her work and see in the flesh. But if you really want something and you search for it, you will find someone, somewhere who can put you in touch with someone else who opens a door,” Jacques says of her experience. “Wilke had had a rough ride even from her contemporaries in the ’70s. She was too beautiful. It wasn’t until she made the body of work when she was dying from lymphoma, of photographs of herself bloated and losing her hair, that people accepted her.” The gallery was the first in Europe to hold a solo exhibition of Wilke’s work. Tate bought a small piece, and the purchase set in motion a relationship with Jacques and Wilke’s estate and archive that eventually resulted in the public gallery purchasing the largest installation Wilke ever made – prices now reach up to $1m for large installations (though small drawings can start from around $35,000).
Focusing on the art historical and female artists who were not getting their dues was also a way to future-proof the gallery against “the increasing number of situations when large ‘supermarket’ galleries try to take what we have built,” she says, referring to the poaching of emerging artists just at the point that they start to gain recognition. Jacques had some experience with estates, having taken on Robert Mapplethorpe’s in 1999, when she was in partnership with fellow gallerist Charles Asprey, running Asprey Jacques. At the time, the American photographic artist was not being shown in museums. Jacques worked with the Foundation to promote some of his lesser-known bodies of work – from Polaroids to unique sculptures to jewellery – and began to build a specialist reputation.
It’s a similar story with Betty Parsons, the late New York gallerist celebrated for championing new American painting by the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, but whose success often overshadowed her own role as an artist. Jacques’s exhibition of Parsons’s paintings, gouaches on paper and sculptures last year was the first London exhibition for nearly 40 years, and one of the hottest tickets during Frieze Week.
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