Samantha McEwen

Exhibition Catalogue Samantha McEwen. London / Paris / New york. Works from the 1980's to the Present, presented at Modesti Perdriolle Gallery, Brussels (April 10 – June 29, 2024).

This book traces the life and radiant work of Samantha McEwen from the early 1980s to the present day.

Who is Samantha McEwen? Who is this Anglo-American artist born in 1960 in London, about whom Keith Haring declares in one of his interviews: “When I arrived in New York, I spent my time at school (School of Visual Arts). Everything was new and exciting. I was 20 years old. In my drawing class, I was immediately drawn to a girl named Samantha McEwen.” Samantha remembers: “He sat in front of me and said: ‘Can I draw you?’”

Who is this artist, still relatively unknown to this day, who also models for Francesco Clemente and Alex Katz?  However, very few texts exist about her work; art critics are mainly men who write about men. In the numerous articles of the art press on these exhibitions, her name is merely mentioned and rarely accompanied by a few lines. A revealing paradox of that era, Samantha McEwen is found in full-page spreads in the fashion sections of major magazines, such as Interview (Andy Warhol’s magazine) and The New York Times Magazine.

By the late 1980s in New York, most of Samantha’s friends disappear, taken by AIDS or drugs. Samantha McEwen returns to live in London and begins (or simply continues) a long period of obscurity, like most female artists of those generations. It takes until the 2010s for her work to reappear.

This happens in 2015 in London, in the famous group exhibition organized by Pace Gallery in homage to the great London art dealer Robert Fraser. 48 artists are presented, 45 men and 3 women.

Hervé Perdriolle is an art critic and curator. After organizing the first show of the French Figuration Libre movement (Blanchard, Boisrond, Combas, Di Rosa, Viollet) in Paris (1981), he took part in the first exhibitions of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1984).

Linda Yablonsky is an arts journalist and critic based in New York, where she is a correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a frequent contributor to many other publications as well as to several exhibition catalogues and monographs, including Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines (Princeton University Press, 2022). She is also the author of The Story of Junk: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997) and of a forthcoming biography of the artist Jeff Koons.

Neal Brown is an artist and poet-writer based in London. He has written about contemporary art for most UK and many international art magazines, and is the author of a number of books, including for Tate. He also curates, is a songwriter, and writes about punk.