Avis Newman

Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts

Article

No. 38 • May 2025

For generations, the story of art has been told through a singular lens. When the first editions of canonical texts like Janson’s History of Art and Gombrich’s The Story of Art were published, they featured zero women artists. The Pretty Brilliant: Women in the Arts series aims to make whole what has long been a one-sided story. In these issues, featuring 583 artists, we celebrate women who have always been creating, innovating, and inspiring, like Avis Newman.

Avis Newman, {{The Wing of the Wind of Madness}}, 1982, acrylic paint, metallic paint, cotton gauze, muslin and paper on canvas, 273 × 369 cm, Tate collection | © Avis Newman, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Fig 1. Avis Newman, The Wing of the Wind of Madness, 1982, acrylic paint, metallic paint, cotton gauze, muslin and paper on canvas, 273 × 369 cm, Tate collection | © Avis Newman, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

text: Catherine de Zegher

Avis Newman (b. 1946) has long been fascinated by the structures and procedures of drawings found in ancient cultures, including Palaeolithic cave art – the meanings of which are unknowable to our contemporary mind. The earthy tones, simplified marks and fragmented images of the body and animal-like forms in The Wing of the Wind of Madness (1982) reference these ideas. It belongs to a group of large abstract paintings on unstretched canvas directly pinned to the wall that she made throughout the 1980s.

Fig 2. Avis Newman

Newman’s work is much informed by the mark as a sign and a process of layered accumulation that encourages the viewer to experience the present moment of looking – that is of the ‘real’, which is endlessly in a perpetual state of change. In this sense, what is experienced are unformed and energetic compositions that interrogate and draw attention to the activity of a gestural mark. And the unframed canvases embody the open-endedness of this creative process. Therefore, concepts of boundary and edge are of continuous concern to the artist as well as the intuitive investigation of unconscious processes.

Since 2007, Newman has described her multiple canvas works as ‘Configuration of no-thing’ rather than ‘a construction’ or ‘a composition’ – ‘a configuration allowing for the work not to have an absolute fixity.’ Provisional in arrangement, Newman’s cycle of Configurations suggests an ambivalent body of relations with the potential to be perpetually available to reconfiguration without completion. This mobility seems to address the possibilities of the condition of the unstable subject in the present world as a series of variables.

Avis Newman is featured in See All This #38: Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts Vol. III. Order a copy here.