Judy Chicago: Revelations – an ‘absorbing’ show from a pioneering feminist artist

For 60 years, the American feminist artist Judy Chicago has been making “thunderous art driven by the certainty that men are bad and women are good”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born Judith Cohen to liberal Jewish parents in Chicago in 1939, she adopted the name of her home city “as an act of American camouflage” and, from the 1960s, sought to create a form of art that went against the grain of tasteful, male-dominated modernism. Once derided by the art establishment, Chicago’s angry, unsubtle and frequently thrilling work is finally getting the recognition it deserves. 

This new exhibition confirms her as an artistic “pioneer” possessed of a “particularly intense” imagination. Taking as its starting point an unpublished illuminated manuscript from the 1970s that retells the “Book of Genesis” from a feminist perspective – it begins in a paediatric unit – the show contains some 200 paintings, drawings and installations created over the course of her career. Its exhibits tear “into men and their history with unconfined zest”; the result is a “weird” and “impactful” event.