Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to announce ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’, an exhibition by the trailblazing feminist artist Marianne Wex, featuring the influential series ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977.’ Widely celebrated upon its debut almost 47 years ago, Wex’s provocative photographs of everyday patriarchy approaches the topic across mediations of documentary, art history, and commercial advertising. The work renders visible the hidden effects of sexist ideology across time and space and thus aims to make patriarchy thinkable not only as a societal norm but also as an epistemic field that individuals inhabit. What Wex provides the viewer is a taxonomy by which they might begin to see patterns of gendered embodiment, a focus that anticipates theorisation’s of iterative performance among late-twentieth-century feminists. Far from essentialising her subjects, Wex’s photographs offer nuanced readings of class and social hierarchies, drawing attention to the ways in which, in some cases, a person pushes back against social expectations by exercising atypical gendered body language. Marianne Wex was born in 1937 in Hamburg and passed away in 2020 in Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany. She studied at the Academies of Art in Hamburg and Mexico City, and was a professor of the Academy of Art, Hamburg from 1963 to 1980. ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’ was first exhibited as part of ‘Women Artists International 1877–1977’ at nGbK, Berlin. Wex’s work was shown for the first time in decades at Focal Point Gallery, Southend in 2009, then in a more comprehensive form at the Badischer Kunstverein, Kalsruhe in 2012, and at Tanya Leighton, Berlin in 2018 in collaboration with Mike Sperlinger, Professor of Theory and Writing at the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo. Other recent exhibitions include Centre Canadien d'Architecture, Montréal; Galeria Zachęta, National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; Gasworks, London; LA Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec, Paris; and Yale Union, Portland. Her work is held in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York. Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11–5pm and by appointment. Image: Marianne Wex Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (Sitting Legs), 1977/2018