The Guerrilla Girls — À propos — Slash Paris

In 1985, The Guerrilla Girls made a startling observation: of the 169 artists featured in the MoMA exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, only a small minority were women or artists of colour.

From that moment on the group unceasingly created poster campaigns, handouts, leaflets and other ephemera in the aim of “opening the public eye to the discrimination which reigns within our very phallo- and ethno-centric artistic institutions”1.

Their printed matter is most often used in the context of actions taking place in public spaces. Pasting up posters in the street and handing out flyers or manifestos allow The Guerrilla Girls to reach a wider audience, but direct contact with the general public also exposes them to confrontation and the risk of violent reactions from opponents who wish to silence them.

Keeping in mind their will to communicate with the masses, these “Bad Girls” employ simple yet striking visual codes. Their texts are as succinct and incisive as advertising slogans and are systematically typeset in capital letters and bold or ultra-bold fonts. The posters are printed in flashy colours and one can clearly observe a penchant for girly pinks, yellow, red and black. Images are directly plundered from archetypal scenes of art history and radically set against monochrome backgrounds by means of brash digital cutouts, free of any secondary and superfluous information.