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 Untitled, c. 1964–65, Wilke demonstrates her early exploration of bodily form and symbolic mark-making. Executed with oil stick, pastel, and charcoal on rice paper, the composition balances gestural abstraction with suggestive often erotic figuration. Curving lines and circular forms cluster near the center of the page, evoking organic or anatomical structures, while arrows, loops and rhythmic stripes introduce a sense of systems or flows within a living organism. Bold blues, reds, and blacks animate the surface, creating a visual rhythm that suggests both internal energy and structural tension. Three bold black and white untitled compositions, each done c. 1965, similarly contain energetic mark-making and biomorphous forms with glimpses of figuration. In another series from the late 1960s, Wilke uses soft pastel colors with precise pencil lines on cut paper, reminiscent of a sewing pattern. Each of the layered compositions in this series contains a central sensual and surreal form that stands in contrast to the structured background.

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.
 
Hannah Wilke (b. New York, NY, 1940; d. Houston, TX, 1993) trained at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. During her lifetime, Wilke was the subject of key solo exhibitions including Hannah Wilke: Starification Photographs and Videotapes at the University of California, Irvine (1976) and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective at the University of Missouri (1989). Other more recent solo exhibitions at major institutions include Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2022), Hannah Wilke: Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2008) and a solo gallery at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). Wilke has also been included in significant group exhibitions, including: Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, Acquavella Galleries, New York (2021), Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London (2016); Human Nature, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Naked Before the Camera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, MoMA, New York, NY (2010); elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2009-10): WACK!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Sexual Politics, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, (1996.) Her work is featured in major museum and foundation collections including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City, among others.