Judy Chicago: Revelations – an 'absorbing' show from a pioneering feminist artist
The new exhibition contains some 200 paintings, drawings and installations

For 60 years, the American feminist artist Judy Chicago has been making "thunderous art driven by the certainty that men are bad and women are good", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born Judith Cohen to liberal Jewish parents in Chicago in 1939, she adopted the name of her home city "as an act of American camouflage" and, from the 1960s, sought to create a form of art that went against the grain of tasteful, male-dominated modernism. Once derided by the art establishment, Chicago's angry, unsubtle and frequently thrilling work is finally getting the recognition it deserves.
This new exhibition confirms her as an artistic "pioneer" possessed of a "particularly intense" imagination. Taking as its starting point an unpublished illuminated manuscript from the 1970s that retells the "Book of Genesis" from a feminist perspective – it begins in a paediatric unit – the show contains some 200 paintings, drawings and installations created over the course of her career. Its exhibits tear "into men and their history with unconfined zest"; the result is a "weird" and "impactful" event.
"Intense" is the operative word here, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Much of the work in this "absorbing" show revolves around childbirth, an "iconographic void within art history", which Chicago "admirably sought to fill". A case in point is 1982's "In the Beginning", a 32ft-long "primordial panorama" in which "a newborn suckles on lava-coloured nipples" and tiny creatures "spew from a suggestive chasm". Or there's "The Crowning" (2010), a work at once "like a vorticist painting and a Mayan relief": an "unforgettable" vision of a baby's head emerging during birth. This is a sometimes "mesmerising" show, even if Chicago's depictions of men as "grimacing, nose-picking, sloppily urinating horrors" are "caricatured and ludicrous", and her thoughts on climate change "have the nuance of a placard".
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Chicago can be "crude" and sometimes unforgivably "twee", said Laura Cumming in The Observer. "What if Women Ruled the World?" (2023), for instance, is a vast, winsome series of quilted hangings that imagines a planet governed by "peace, love and female understanding". Yet, by and large, her aesthetics and her graphic style are insistently compelling throughout. Early works such as 1974's "Peeling Back" are "trippy, psychedelic, glowing with vibrations, yet immaculately graphic", her "beautifully smooth gradations of colour" and "distinctive cursive script" a delightful expressive reaction to 1960s minimalism. A series of silhouette drawings, meanwhile, is "terrific, hazy around the edges, pin-sharp with the shapes of women in labour, or childbirth". Perhaps most importantly, Chicago's art always "holds itself open to dispute": my advice is to "take a friend", consider what you see, "then go ahead and argue".
Serpentine Gallery, London W2. Until 1 September
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Mustardy beans and hazelnuts recipe
The Week Recommends Nod to French classic offers zingy, fresh taste
-
Susie Dent picks her favourite books
The Week Recommends The lexicographer and etymologist shares works by Jane Goodall, Noel Streatfeild and Madeleine Pelling
-
6 incredible homes under $1 million
Feature Featuring a home in the National Historic Landmark District of Virginia and a renovated mid-century modern house in Washington
-
The Harder They Come: ‘triumphant’ adaptation of cinema classic
The Week Recommends ‘Uniformly excellent’ cast follow an aspiring musician facing the ‘corruption’ of Kingston, Jamaica
-
House of Guinness: ‘rip-roaring’ Dublin brewing dynasty period drama
The Week Recommends The Irish series mixes the family tangles of ‘Downton’ and ‘Succession’ for a ‘dark’ and ‘quaffable’ watch
-
Dead of Winter: a ‘kick-ass’ hostage thriller
The Week Recommends Emma Thompson plays against type in suspenseful Minnesota-set hair-raiser ‘ringing with gunshots’
-
A Booker shortlist for grown-ups?
Talking Point Dominated by middle-aged authors, this year’s list is a return to ‘good old-fashioned literary fiction’
-
Fractured France: an ‘informative and funny’ enquiry
The Week Recommends Andrew Hussey's work is a blend of ‘memoir, travelogue and personal confession’