Bibi Lenček: A Retrospective Exhibition Hours:

Opening Reception: Monday, May 22, 2023 from 6pm – 9pm Tuesday, May 23 – Thursday, May, 25, 2023 from 1pm – 6pm Closing Talk & Reception: Thursday, May 25, 2023 from 6pm – 8pm

Bibi Lenček: A Retrospective Website: https://bibilencek.com Instagram: ( https://www.instagram.com/bibilencekarchive )

Works by pioneering feminist artist Bibi Lenček on display for limited run in career-spanning retrospective at One Art Space NYC.

One Art Space Gallery is delighted to announce the upcoming solo retrospective of Bibi Lenček, a pioneering feminist artist whose work spans five decades. The exhibition will take place from May 22 to 25, 2023, at the One Art Space Gallery at 23 Warren Street, Manhattan.

Bibi Lenček is an Italian-Slovene artist who holds an MFA from the Columbia University School of Arts, and studied under the direction of Alex Katz, Leon Golub, and Wayne Thiebaud. A longtime resident and community art teacher in TriBeCa, NYC, Lenček has exhibited widely both domestically and internationally, including at A.I.R. Gallery, and the Grey Art Gallery at NYU, and her work is in the Sylvia Sleigh collection of Rowan University Art Gallery. Her figurative paintings and large-scale pastels have garnered critical acclaim for their radical thematics, lush technique, and luminous color from such prominent critics as Lawrence Alloway, Bill Zimmer, and Lucy Lippard.

The exhibition will showcase Lenček’s figurative, feminist art that responds to the world with a radical female sensibility. From paintings of fornicating couples entwined in bedsheets to large-scale pastels celebrate the sensuous abandon of a swimmer moving through water, Lenček’s work unabashedly revels in the beauty of the human body while challenging the tradition in which male artists depicted anonymous, idealized, and often eroticized female models. Lenček’s work has challenged both societal norms and art world conventions, and as a result, was not without controversy. Her daring depiction of frontal nudes featuring heterosexual and interracial couples making love sparked student protests when exhibited at Rutgers University in the fall of 1975.

The paintings, oil pastels, prints, collages, and watercolors on view at One Art Space span Lenček’s half-century career and capture her ongoing fascination with overlooked moments of domesticity. Lenček subjects—rendered with reverence and adoring intimacy —include smoke unfurling from a cigarette, a discarded bra, an upturned tea cup, and other fugitive fragments from the epic of quotidian life. Her works freeze-frame moments of transition that speak of multiple minute decisions—personal, cultural, historical.

Elsewhere, as in her oil pastel triptychs, Lenček celebrates the continuity between the world of humans and other life forms – racoons, owls, monkeys – stressing the sheer biological joy of existence.

Lenček’s lifelong contributions to the woman’s art movement were significant in terms of challenging patriarchal norms and promoting the visibility of women’s art. A frequent contributor to the Women Artist’s Newsletter (1971-1983), a seminal publication that provided a platform for female artists to share their experiences and promote their work, she also served on the coordinating committee for Views by Women Artists, a series of 16 independently curated shows in 1982. Lenček was a board member of the NYC Women’s Caucus for Arts and in her later career went on to initiate Girl Talk, a pop-up curatorial collaboration in 2005 and 2013 at Gallery Gaia in Brooklyn.

The forthcoming exhibition at One Art Space Gallery will be an unprecedented, career-spanning survey of Lenček’s work that offers viewers the chance experience its beauty and thought-provoking nature firsthand, and will also be a celebration of Lenček’s lifelong commitment to her art and the feminist movement.

Bibi Lenček: A Retrospective will open on May 22, with a reception taking place from 6 to 9pm on May 22. This will be followed by a closing talk and reception on May 25. A catalog of Lenček’s work will be available for purchase at the gallery.

Bibi Lenček was born in 1947 in Trieste, Italy. The artist lives in New York City. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Hays Fellowship, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her work is in the Sylvia Sleigh Collection at the Rowan University Art Gallery.

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