Drawing on the avant-garde movements of both Expressionism and Surrealism, the women of Abstract Expressionism redefined artistic practice as an immersive arena for action, process and consciousness. Their paintings were regarded not as images but as events. It is often said that the movement began in the USA, but this exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing gestural abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts – from the rise of fascism in parts of South America and East Asia to the influence of Communism in Eastern Europe and China.

This major European touring exhibition, Action/Gesture/Paint: Women Artists and Abstraction Worldwide 1940–1970, will include of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 80 international women artists, from well-known practitioners such as Carmen Herrera, Etel Adnan, Sandra Blow and Helen Frankenthaler, to lesser-known names such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985).