Woman in a Rowboat at Olivia Foundation

Anna Weyant's Girl in Window and Simone Leigh's Fashion fair. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation, Mexico City.

By RACHEL BENHAM July 22, 2025

While most private galleries stand contemplative, untroubled by little more than the faintest, occasional whispers, Olivia Foundation has more footfall than many of the small boutiques that line the same street in Mexico City’s Roma Norte. With Time magazine listing the gallery as one of the world’s greatest places, it evidently finds its way onto the itinerary of many who visit the city.

General view of Woman in a Rowboat at the Olivia Foundation, curated by Diana Nawi. Photo by Studio Chirika, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

Olivia Foundation’s current show, curated by Diana Nawi, arrives with the title Woman in a Rowboat, borrowing from a painting of the same name by Willem de Kooning and invoking, by reference to the image, the kind of fractured, disintegrating female identities which are often explored through the work on display. The exhibition notes inform the viewer that the “works by intergenerational and primarily women artists evidence the many vocabularies through which we express our inner lives”, and this primes us for a voyage often refracted through the female gaze.

Rowboats suggest short trips, manageable distances. They linger in spaces built for leisure, time unclipped from its moorings. Nowhere, truly, to be. But there is little that is languid in Sarah Lucas’s Something Celia Said. Here, the female body is caricature, reduced to lewd signifiers, breasts draped slack like faded laundry. Fuck me shoes in the same sick flesh tone that covers the twisting legs. There is an anticipated erasure: a figure without a head, the shape of the body curved backwards against the chair as if seeking a shield, but finding only more exposure. The hand, too, more of a paw, animal, curves protectively over the void where the face should be, a trace of a ghost in a space where thoughts are not made concrete.

Sarah Lucas, Something Celia Said. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

In Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis, the hat it a symbol of authority and power: it emphasizes the head, protects it, it transmits the notion of the value within. But as one moves through Woman in a Rowboat, it’s notable that the head is the opposite of protected or emphasized: it is frequently erased. It is often required to exist only in the viewer’s body schema and is regularly understood by its absence. Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ethical interaction is built foundationally on the existence and recognition of the face of the other, but female bodies here are built often with the suggestion of this as an impossibility.

 Kiki Smith, Quiver. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

Kiki Smith’s Quiver plays too with the ambivalence of inhabiting the female body, with both the title and the darts that puncture the bronze sculpture speaking of targets, of wounds, of movement given to fear rather than escape or autonomy. Speaking of fawns.

Detailing in the sculpture is light, almost invisible without scrutiny: a face scrawled rudimentary and naïve. The scrape of lines without depth, a faint smile scratched into a superficial face, showing no trace of pain or injury despite the way the body is pierced by darts surely too decorative to cause harm.

In this sense, Lucas and Smith do something similar, playing with absence, with a refusal to represent the cognitive, with bodies where heads either do not exist or show such a voided response that the internal world of the body in question is mourned through its negation.

Anna Weyant, Girl in Window. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

If headlessness is a motif that runs through the show, then it speaks to an anxiety and an understanding on the part of the artists. It speaks to a disintegration. In Anna Weyant’s Girl in Window, the alabaster body is breasts swollen impossibly against the truth of gravity, face shielded entirely by the window blinds that hang much like a theatre’s house curtain. A body frozen in either the beginning or the end of a performance. An identity that begins and ends with the body. Either exhibitionist or body pinned like a butterfly by the voyeur. It reminds us that to be watched is not to be seen.

Tracy Emin’s bronze sculpture, Thinking of You Again, is one of the figurative works in the exhibition where self-reflexivity is retained, however. Here, the head is turned towards the body and away from the viewer, resolving the dichotomy and existing instead in its own private tension. The figurative lines so characteristic of Emin’s work, where flow does not submit to coiling or curving into the ideal form, but instead communicates liveness, are present here, too.

Tracey Emin, Thinking of you again. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

In many ways the centrepiece of Woman in a Rowboat, Simone Leigh’s Fashion Fair also exists without a head; yet due to the sheer size and grace of the form, the sculpture successfully transcends questions of erasure or gaze, inviting viewers to experience presence beyond, rather than despite, identity.

Leigh’s wider body of work showcases the same confrontation and assertion of existence: female bodies booming in bronze-timbred voices. Work built as an expression of strength and value, a belief in the fundamental solidity of one’s own being.

Simone Leigh, Fashion fair. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

Here, Fashion Fair steps into a space where identity moves beyond embodiment, where female representation celebrates creation and externalised expression. The sculpture’s colossal skirt provides amplification rather than attenuation. Gaze, now, has no space for the problematic, the blanking to take hold.

Of course, not all of the art on show in Woman in a Rowboat engages with some kind of metaphorical beheading of the female body, whether evading or inviting it in figurative representation. Given the Olivia Foundation’s commitment to collecting post-war abstract work, this movement and those adjacent are equally well represented in the exhibition.

Joan Snyder, Magic Meadow. Photo by Andy Butler, courtesy Olivia Foundation.

Luminous at the entrance to the gallery, Joan Snyder’s gestural Magic Meadow shimmers with repeated forms, building landscape from shapes and lines that belong to the romantic rather than the rules of topography. Bleeding and blending with colour, Snyder’s work produces a kind of echoing joy. It exudes, exceeds itself.

To be in excess is, of course, to be quantified. In one sense, measurement is a step to regulation, but it can be, too, in art, a tool to account for oneself. By making these lines here in this way, one can say, I was there and it was like this.

Women’s art so often engages with the unsettling question of who one is seen as, who one truly is, and who one must pretend to be in order to survive within the patriarchal economy. The female-coded body exists within culture both as a provocation and as the sacred flesh container of a conscious actor. Making space for women’s art remains essential for this reason. WM.