Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) House #3, Providence

Description:

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)

House #3, Providence, 1975-76, printed later. Signed by George and Betty Woodman in pencil and with the estate's "PE/FW" hand stamp on the verso at bottom, numbered, titled, and dated "4/40..." in pencil on the verso at bottom. Gelatin silver print, image size 6 x 6 in. (15.2 x 15.2 cm),framed.
Condition: Minor handling crease l.r.

Provenance: Collection of Bernard Toale and Joseph Zina, Boston, Massachusetts.

N.B. As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, Francesca Woodman created a unique body of photographic work that explored and reinterpreted the genres of self-portraiture and the female form. Favoring decaying and decrepit interiors such as the house in Providence depicted here, Woodman's dematerialized form appears to merge with the wall, a visual effect reminiscent of a painting by Nabi artist Édouard Vuillard. As evidenced in her mysterious and evocative images, while aware of the feminist discourses of her time, Woodman "approached female selfhood and sexuality from a deeply personal-rather than political or programmatic-point of view" [Corey Keller, ed., Francesca Woodman (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art in association with Distributed Arts Publishing, 2011),169]. Although she committed suicide in 1981 at the young age of twenty-two, Woodman's work has been hugely influential on subsequent generations of photographers and was reconsidered in a 2011-2012 retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Estimate $4,000-6,000

Sheet measures 10 x 8 in. (25.5 x 20.4 cm). The handling crease is primarily in the margin. No additional issues to report.


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