When we launched Murus Art we set out to support female artists and curate our collection to promote contemporary female artists, who are under represented in galleries.

This International Women’s Day we launch our 60:40 Art Pledge; committing to represent 60% female artists within our collection.

Recent figures show that only 14% of living artists represented by galleries in Europe and North America are women. In the last 10 years, women artists represented only 2% of all auction sales and just 11% of all museum acquisitions according to research by Sotheby’s. 

Public art collections and commercial galleries for the most part represent considerably more men than women, this is why we have launched the 60:40 Art Pledge.

By celebrating women’s achievement in contemporary art, we hope to encourage other galleries to review their inventory and consider upping the number of female artists they represent.

A ground-breaking Art Market 2019 report for Art Basel and UBS Why Is Work by Female Artists Still Valued Less Than Work By Male Artists? –  published by Artsy.net – examined the causes of today’s gender imbalance:

“Untangling the reasons that this inequality persists today is more difficult. Differences in gallery representation; the cultural biases of art interpretation; the cliché of the art world “bad boy”; the “sexism of ageing”; the imbalanced weight of parenthood; the proportion of curators, collectors, and gallery representatives who are female; and the lack of assertiveness among female artists have all been proposed as hypothetical causes…. It is not hard to grasp the origins of this inequality, given that women were largely barred from artistic professions and training until the 1870s.” 

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world” making it timely for us to highlight recent reports about the art world’s gender imbalance and how we plan to do our part to change this.

Here are a few of the amazing artists we represent, you can read more about their work, inspirations and creative process.

Meet the rest of our talented female artists here.

Erica and Rose x