-Monday 24 October-6pm to 8 March 2023

The exhibition will take place in the Parlamentarium, The European Parliament’s Visitors Centre in Brussels, which is accessible upon registration.

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Art Herstory

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Female perspectives in the European Parliament’s Contemporary Art Collection

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Founded in 1980 by the first democratically elected President of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, the European Parliament Contemporary Art Collection embodies the values and aspirations of the European Union. Today, it contains more than 500 works of art from all Member States of the European Union.

The European Parliament has adapted its acquisition strategy to reach a gender-balanced collection of contemporary art in the near future. In that regard, our collection is one of the few that has explicitly pledge towards parity. This implies gathering documentation, conducting research and writing about these artists to ensure their perspectives, histories and voices are respectively recorded, written and heard. Art produced by women is not a genre, a niche or a style. It’s simply art. These women, simply artists. Unfortunately, a focus on gender – in response to decades of erasure – is temporarily necessary to transcend the distinction altogether.

The artists featured in the exhibition Herstory, which combines most recent acquisitions with a selection of older contributions to the collection, illustrate the importance and relevance of female perspectives. Unique and subjective in their inception, each perception grows, through its artistic medium of choice, into a universally appreciable and appropriable story, moment, vision or emotion; elements the Contemporary Art Collection will continue to build on in the future.