Elisabeth Frink, Four Heads, 1976, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980

RE: CIRCULATION 001 — Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980

For centuries, “man” could stand in for humanity. Woman appeared as image.

In October 1980, Women’s Images of Men opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Its proposition now sounds almost disarmingly straightforward: women artists making images of men.

The reversal was not straightforward at all.

The history of Western art had long allowed the male subject to occupy several positions simultaneously. Man could be artist, viewer, critic, authority and apparently universal human subject. Woman, meanwhile, repeatedly appeared on the other side of that arrangement: observed, represented, classified.

Women’s Images of Men changed the position.

Man became the category.

The exhibition brought together very different approaches to the male image. There was no attempt to replace one fixed representation with another. Masculinity appears as body, performance, authority, intimacy, caricature, sexuality, social role and institutional presence.

Anya Teixeira, Fight at the Fair, 1972, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980

In Anya Teixeira’s Fight at the Fair the male body is caught inside public behaviour and confrontation. Elisabeth Frink’s heads strip representation towards type and physiognomy. Erica Daborn isolates the face. Mayotte Magnus photographs Francis Bacon, himself one of the twentieth century’s great producers of distorted bodies, and places him momentarily on the receiving end of another artist’s camera.

Mayotte Magnus, Francis Bacon, 1973, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980 Erica Daborn, Bald Frier, 1979, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980 Elisabeth Frink, Four Heads, 1976, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980

Elsewhere, the category expands beyond portraiture.

Pat Whiteread’s Boardroom turns attention towards the environments in which male authority becomes ordinary: suits, furniture, posture, hierarchy. Sally Greenhill’s photograph of participants in the “Great Debate” similarly records masculinity not as an abstract identity but as something organised socially — seated, assembled and institutionally positioned.

Pat Whiteread, Boardroom, 1980, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980 Sally Greenhill, Participants in the Great Debate, reproduced in Women's Images of Men, ICA, London, 1980

Authority has an image too.

That may be one of the exhibition’s most useful propositions forty-six years later. The supposedly neutral position is rarely neutral. Someone occupies it. Someone is doing the looking, speaking, selecting, judging or representing.

Once that position becomes visible, it can also become subject matter.

The surviving catalogue carries this argument in another form.

Produced for the ICA exhibition in 1980, Women’s Images of Men entered circulation as information: a publication accompanying a temporary exhibition. Images, essays, captions, names and dates were gathered into a portable institutional object and distributed beyond the gallery.

The exhibition closed.

The catalogue continued.

That subsequent life is the starting point for RE: CIRCULATION.

RE: CIRCULATION returns selected publications, exhibitions, images and arguments to view through material held by The New Rare. It is not intended as nostalgia, nor as an attempt to reconstruct an exhibition exactly as it once existed. The original object remains the source. What changes is its placement.

An image printed in a 1980 catalogue appears again on a screen in 2026. A photograph becomes a carousel. A caption becomes an editorial proposition. The publication becomes source material for another sequence of looking.

The object has not changed.

Its audience has.

Its context has.

Its circulation begins again.

SOURCE OBJECT
Women’s Images of Men
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
1980

RE: CIRCULATION 001
The New Rare, 2026

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