Nancy Spero verwendet Frauenbildnisse aus unterschiedlichen Epochen und Kulturen, die sie als Prototypen in ihre Collagen einfügt. Sie löst diese damit aus ihrem ursprünglichen Kontext und stellt sie in neue Zusammenhänge.
Für Nancy Spero, die seit 1972 ausschließlich Frauen darstellt, ist die Weltgeschichte eine Geschichte der Kriege und damit auch eine Geschichte der Frauen - eine Geschichte der Opfer sowie des Überlebens.
Permanente Wandfresken von Nancy Spero entstanden in den USA (U-Bahn-Station Lincoln Centre in New York) und in Europa, drei davon in Österreich: im Ronachertheater Wien, im Jüdischen Museum Wien und im Heeresspital Innsbruck.
Nancy Spero is choosing images of women from various periods and cultures for her collages, always dealing with war and cult. For her, history is a history of wars and therefore a history of women, of victims as well as of surviving.
„Avoiding a feminist rant, Spero treads a fine line between polemic and humour. Humour is indeed a key weapon in her armoury, yet the dark side is never far from the surface.“
(Elizabeth A.Macgregor)
Nancy Spero´s work „is a vital utopia in process, uncertain and unpredictable: a procession of maternal/feminine figures in a loose choreography (...), an homage to creation, and its continual potential for self-revision and the challenging of social and cultural order.“ (Catherine de Zegher)
She has completed a number of permanent installations and wall works at venues in the U.S. (Lincoln Centre subway station, New York) and Europe, three of them in Austria:
Ronacher Theatre, Vienna, Jüdisches Museum, Vienna and Heeresspital, Innsbruck.
“Once you and I were talking about the printing process I use in which the same figure appears and reappears in an extended narrative format. You mentioned Gertrude Stein´s use of repetition and her term, the “continuous present”. That is a good term for what I´m doing. The history of women I envision is neither linear nor sequential. I try, in everything I do – from using the ancient texts, to the mythological goddesses, to H.D.´s poems on Helen of Egypt – to show that it all has reverberations for us today. And then it makes sense.”
Quot.: Jo Anna Isaak in conversation with Nancy Spero. Phaidon Press Limited, London 1996, p.24.
“Once you and I were talking about the printing process I use in which the same figure appears and reappears in an extended narrative format. You mentioned Gertrude Stein´s use of repetition and her term, the “continuous present”. That is a good term for what I´m doing. The history of women I envision is neither linear nor sequential. I try, in everything I do – from using the ancient texts, to the mythological goddesses, to H.D.´s poems on Helen of Egypt – to show that it all has reverberations for us today. And then it makes sense.”
Quot.: Jo Anna Isaak in conversation with Nancy Spero. Phaidon Press Limited, London 1996, p.24
