Born: 4 April 1944, United Kingdom
Died: 12 March 2023
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Another artist who made waves at the Venice Biennale decades later was Phyllida Barlow, who was 74 when she represented the United Kingdom in 2017. Born in 1944, Barlow had attended the Chelsea College of Arts and Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s. As she would continue to do until her death in 2023, Barlow made art for years, amidst the demands of raising five children and teaching art courses with different institutions. But despite being included in the occasional group exhibition, her work remained in obscurity for the decades of her more than 50-year career. As The Guardian later asked, “After overlooking her for decades, the art world has woken up to Phyllida Barlow’s audacious, gargantuan sculptures. Now she is representing Britain at the Venice Biennale—but why did it take so long for her to be “discovered”?”
The year she turned 40, Barlow seemingly decided that if the art industry’s established processes weren’t going to work for her, she’d throw them to the wind. As The Guardian recounts,
Her CV from the mid-1980s lists the venues for what are grandly listed as “Solo Exhibitions”. They include “Finsbury Park school playground”; “Archway Road, abandoned house” and “Old Stocking Factory, Mare Street”. In the 1990s she made a series of buffoonish, absurd works that she installed, illicitly, on the street, or in friends’ houses. One was a kind of hat for an upright piano; another a sort of bunny-eared crown for a television; another a weird four-legged ovoid that sat on an ironing board.
She would later compare the art world to an iceberg, with some artists working above the surface, visible to the world, as other toiled, hidden, beneath the waterline. Slowly, the art world began to take notice of Barlow, who had been in their midst, part of their group shows, winning awards here and there, and leaving installations all over London, for decades.
Finally in 2010, Barlow, who had sold barely any pieces in her decades-long career to date, signed with the commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth. It was the same year she retired from teaching at age 65. With financial backing, Barlow was able to scale up her work in large installations, while the company’s marketing side created e-commerce revenue by selling her smaller works, such as drawings, online. As The Guardian notes,
Barlow’s years of being overlooked are “an indictment of our art world in the U.K.,” says Frances Morris, who told me she felt a sense of “institutional guilt” on behalf of the Tate. “She had had significant shows at significant places, regional shows. She should have been recognized.” So why wasn’t she? “Gender. The fact that she was known as a teacher.” Morris also said that the Tate and other institutions had tended to focus on collecting via London’s commercial galleries – of which there were only two or three of any real standing before the 1990s. Put simply, since Barlow’s work wasn’t for sale, it didn’t get bought.
In 2011, she was named a Royal Academician and in 2014, received a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), which was upgraded in 2021 to a damehood. She was commissioned to create a large-scale installation for the Tate in 2014 and, in 2017, unveiled her work folly at the Venice Biennale: “A confection of carefully contrived flotsam and jetsam, folly’s papier-mache lollipops and abstract expressionist doors tumbled out of the pavilion and into the gardens beyond.” The renegade had brought her unique aesthetic to Venice.