Claude Cahun, 1927. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections

During 1919, Parisian artist and writer Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob (1894 – 1954), age 25, identified as Claude Cahun. A talented photographer, she was one of the few women surrealists in André Breton’s French surrealist circle. Her theatrical oeuvre featured shaven-headed androgynous self-portraits where she wore cloaks, masks, cross-dressed and transformed herself into different characters. During the 1990s, her work achieved international posthumous fame and are admired in museums around the world.

Female Figure Standing, Dora Carrington (1893–1932). UCL Art Museum. Image credit: UCL Culture

Dora Carrington was a polymath who expressed herself through painting, decorative pottery, murals, book designs, fireplace tiles, inn signs and quilts, as well as making several films. She began her career at The Slade School of Art in 1910, exposing her to the Bloomsbury group, where she met and fell in love with their founder, the openly gay Lytton Strachey. The pair formed an intimate relationship, becoming deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives. Carrington described her sexuality as ‘hybrid’ and further distinguished herself from the conventional female archetype of the time by accentuating her boyish looks with cropped hair.

Carrington’s most famous female lover was Henrietta Bingham, the sitter for Reclining Nude with Dove in a Mountainous Landscape. When they met, Carrington wrote to Strachey about a woman with the ‘face of a Giotto Madonna’, who ‘made such wonderful cocktails that I became completely drunk and almost made love to her in public’ (quoted in Emily Bingham, Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham, 2015). The painting of Bingham evokes an undertone of lesbian desire. It flouted the fact that during the early 20th century, it was deemed inappropriate by many for women to draw nudes from life.

“Carrington is like some strange wild beast – greedy of life and of tasting all the different ‘worms’.” Ottoline Morrell, quoted in Gerzina, 1995

Ohne Titel, 1930. Hannah Höch. Aus einem ethnographischen Museum

A Surrealist artist and member of the Berlin DADA movement (with Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali), Hannah Höch (1889 – 1978) was a bisexual woman and one of the only women to have forced her way into the Dadaists misogynistic boys’ club in Berlin. She became famous for her photomontages featuring cuttings from newspapers and arts magazines.

Not only did she project a humoristic view on genders, gender-bending, the male gaze and politics in the Weimar Republic, but she publicly commented on her experiences in the art world in a 1920 essay “The Painter“. Seeing herself as part of the women’s movement in the 1920s, she was critical of the way women were portrayed in the media. In 1926, she met Dutch writer and linguist Mathilda ‘Til’ Brugman, and the pair formed a relationship which lasted for nine years.

Darkroom Mirror, 2019. Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a portrait photographer who explores the body through fragments: torsos, arms, legs, or feet – never the whole body. His works challenge the relationship between photographer and sitter, creating a feeling of longing and wanting more. Often, his photographs are torn apart and rearranged with tape, while immersing the viewer in queer culture, as well as conceptions of social and sexual exchange. As he depicts notions of gaze and sensuality, he unravels uncomfortable truths concerning photography’s historical predilection for mangling, in particular, Black queer bodies.

Olivia Strange in her studio. Image courtesy of The London Art Fair

"To me, that's the apogee of what art is about; making the unspeakable speakable and making the unknowable knowable with liberal fluidity and empathy." A Wiccan queer activist and multimedia artist, Olivia Strange creates visceral sculptures and paintings that take cues from the historical oppression of queer individuals. The artist's works are inherently iconoclastic; often discussing gender politics with sexual and mythological motifs that have a sinister edge.

"I try to reclaim stereotypes with symbolic objects like the carabiner clip- a meaningful object within queer culture," says Strange. As a testament of her inclusivity, the artist is careful to welcome all denominations of the LGBTQIA+ community by spelling 'women' as 'womxn' throughout her digital and printed copy. "I don't want my work to be pigeon-holed as only about the historical persecution of women," says Strange. "It's intended to speak to the injustice of all groups of people who are punished unnecessarily simply for being who they are."