MONICA SJÖÖ: THE TIME IS NOW!

A LONDON EXHIBITION SHOWCASES THE ART OF A RADICAL, ECO-FEMINIST, EARTH-MOTHER ACTIVIST

Below, as brutjournal’s London-based artist-correspondent Cathy Ward explains, her recent encounter with the work of the Swedish-born artist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005) made a big impact on her. When a well-informed, sensitive art-maker is deeply moved by the thinking and accomplishments of a talented peer, something noteworthy must be going on.

In the spirit of exploring spirits and the spiritual — this month’s big theme — here, Ward describes her reaction to Sjöö’s powerful paintings and explains what the late artist aimed to express through her work.

Monica Sjöö: The time is NOW and it is overdue!
Curated in collaboration with the Feminist Library
June 11 through September 10, 2022
Beaconsfield
22 Newport Street
Vauxhall, London SE11 6AY
England, United Kingdom

Above, left: The new book in zine format about the Swedish-born artist Monica Sjöö, published by Legion Projects. Above, right: An undated photo of Sjöö from the website of the Monica Sjöö Curatorial Collective showing the artist with, on the left in this image, her iconic, controversial painting from 1968, “God Giving Birth.” Original artworks ©Estate of Monica Sjöö.

Cathy Ward reports:

LONDON— Beaconsfield, an art gallery located in a renovated, Victorian-era building in London’s Lambeth district, across the River Thames from Westminster, is now presenting a remarkable exhibition of the work of the Swedish-born artist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005), who moved to Britain in the late 1950s. The building housing the gallery, which was constructed starting in 1849, was originally the Lambeth Ragged School.

Beaconsfield’s lofty upper gallery room, in which the Sjöö exhibition has been installed, is a space in which young girls were once educated. Certainly, if the artist had lived to see this presentation of her paintings, she would have approved of that historical detail.