Cycladic Talk:
Catherine McCormack – The Venus Trap

Drawing on the Cycladic Museum’s current exhibition Jeff Koons: ‘Venus’ Lespugue, Catherine McCormack, who has contributed with an essay for the exhibition catalogue, takes a closer look at the ‘Venus’ archetype in both art history and broader western visual culture as a category that has shaped expectations about female identity.

Beginning with the enigmatic paleolithic figurines that led feminist archaeologists such as Marija Gimbutas  to argue for evidence of a matriarchal religion, McCormack will trace a potted history of ‘Venus’ as one of the default terms for representations of women across art and culture from classical Greek Aphrodite of Knidos, through Botticelli’s ubiquitous Renaissance example to modernist reworkings, including those by women artists who sought to challenge its limitations as a template for the myth of ideal womanhood.

Dr. Catherine McCormack is an author, academic, critic and independent curator interested in feminism and visual culture. She has taught at University College London, University of Oxford, Sotheby’s Instititute of Art, and Chelsea College of Art and curated exhibitions and programming on ‘Matrescence’ and motherhood, and ‘Radical Joy’. She is the author of Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking, and Defiant Women: 50 Artists and Their Activism. She writes widely about contemporary and historic art for a range of international institutions and is co-editing an academic volume on contemporary art, feminism and spirituality.