The comparativist

The Atkinson's main gallery has a new exhibition, set to stand until March 2027: it's «Taking Centre Stage: Female Artists in The Atkinson’s Collection». While I'd prefer to only have a look at the work herein presented and make a comment on its merits, a theme this provocative deserves, I believe, a few lines, so I'm going head there first. While one theme is as good as the next, the idea of placing a gender as the starting point of an exhibit is twofold flawed– flawed on both ends, if you will, in its conception and in its end. In its conception because it's quite reductive: being a woman is, as means of selection, quite broad; lazy, even. Might as well sort a theme through the lens of «above average height artists»: there's not really a unifying thread to that cloth. And the theme is flawed in its finality, too, because there's no way to be meritorious about it. Let's think of an easy theme: the coast. And, of it , we choose, as curators, who has ...