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The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous activist group made up of women artists and art professionals. They formed in 1985, in response to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York which featured only 13 women out of 169 artists. Under the cover of darkness, they fly-posted SoHo street corners, declaring statistics that exposed the gender-based discrimination in museums and art galleries. They hide their identities behind gorilla masks and have adopted pseudonyms of celebrated dead women artists and writers such as Kathë Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo and Gertrude Stein. Today, the group continue to reveal the racism, sexism and homophobia prevalent in art and society. They are most well-known for text-based posters that drip with wit and sarcasm, holding Euro American institutions accountable for their actions. This dry sense of humour on backgrounds of pop pinks and yellows contrasts with the harrowing story of inequality being told. By using straightforward data and rhetorical questions, the facts speak for themselves.

This sculpture combines elements from two Kippenberger series, the ‘Peter sculptures’ and his ‘drunken lamps’. Here, an angled lamp post skews a bookcase-like structure, while taped to the back is a photo of Kippenberger picking his nose. Kippenberger’s Peter works adopted a DIY aesthetic, using found materials and bits of furniture, often leaving mistakes deliberately visible. They were made in part as a response to the meticulous craftsmanship seen in lots of sculpture. Around this time, he also produced works with bent and wonky lampposts.

Fini’s paintings depict women as complex and powerful beings. Little Hermit Sphinx shows a surreal and unsettling scene. A sphinx sits at the threshold of a decrepit building with a human organ hanging above its head. The sphinx is a mythological creature that is part lion and part woman, with the wings of a bird. In 1947 Fini underwent a hysterectomy. The bleeding flesh above and the broken egg below the sphinx might point to the artist coming to terms with infertility. Here the Sphinx assumes a genderless state, becoming Fini’s alter ego and a recurrent symbol of feminine empowerment in her work.