Serpentine North

Erased, forgotten, overlooked, subjugated and dominated; Judy Chicago saw what history, what society, had done to women, and she did something about it. The pioneering American feminist has spent decades using her art to call out injustice at the hands of the patriarchy. She’s most well known for smoke-based desert performances and ‘The Dinner Party’, a hugely influential installation celebrating thousands of overlooked women. Both are represented here in slightly disappointing documentary form, but this show focuses instead on her drawings and paintings. She has a distinct aesthetic; heady, psychedelic, swirling and geometric. The earliest works here are pulsating, spiralling drawings that seem to throb and glow. The works are heavily symbolic: ‘assertiveness through harsh colours, receptiveness through softer, swirling colour [and] the state of orgasm through colour that dissolves’. They’re beautiful, gentle images, but their messaging is undeniably subtle. So she made it more obvious. Those abstracts eventually are accompanied by texts talking about rejection and identity, and Chicago starts hammering the point home a little more clearly. Cracked tiles talk about being ‘nearly free’, ‘dying to fly’ and ‘full of hope’. A vicious, technicolour, satirical attack on the patriarchy. But it wasn’t enough, and she soon ditched abstraction entirely. Now the works show men pissing on nature, draining women’s souls or with faces contorted and disfigured by the evils of power. Chicag