THE FEMALE GAZE: NAN GOLDIN | MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ | JUNO CALYPSO | CINDY SHERMAN | SHIRIN NESHAT | YOKO ONO & MORE

Art history is filled with images of women, yet far fewer created by women themselves. For centuries, the female figure has appeared as muse, subject, or symbol. The Female Gaze brings together works by women artists who move beyond the role of subject to become the authors of the image—sometimes both muse and maker—offering visions of the world shaped through their lens.

This exhibition features artists whose practices expand and complicate what it means to look. Nan Goldin’s photographs are intensely personal—raw and unflinching, grounded in the communities she inhabits—inviting us into intimate spaces that feel both loving and precarious. Cindy Sherman turns the camera toward performance and transformation, becoming both artist and muse as she inhabits a cast of invented personas, including the ultimate cultural muse, Marilyn herself. In Yoko Ono’s portrait of John Lennon, the gaze quietly reverses: one of the world’s most recognisable men is seen through the intimate perspective of a woman who knew him closely. Shirin Neshat’s powerful images confront the structures that shape women’s lives, combining beauty and defiance to question cultural and political expectations, while Juno Calypso playfully inhabits the exaggerated tropes of femininity through her stylised, surreal self-portraits.

While many of these works centre the female figure and the act of reclaiming the gaze, their subjects are not confined by what is traditionally deemed feminine. From portraiture to performance, from the body to landscape and the wider world, these works reveal the breadth of the female gaze—radical and subtle, playful and serious, intimate and confrontational—revealing that it is not the subject that defines the gaze, but the perspective through which the world is seen.