Why underline civil status again?: Women Artists 1300-1900 at the National Gallery Prague, Riding School.

I had high hopes walking into Women Artists 1300–1900 at the National Gallery Prague - Waldstein Riding School, but the first thing that struck me was how modest the setting felt. Not a grand museum hall, but a compact room. I didn’t realise beforehand that the gallery divides its collection across different sites, and here the scale and ambition of the show, spanning centuries and regions, felt slightly at odds with the modest space.

The exhibition opens with the artistry of nuns, showing medieval paintings and needlework that blend devotional practice with daring imagination. Giving them recognition as artists, not just as women of faith, felt like an important step. From there, it moves through “lifestyles”: monastic life, salon painting, and eventually into the more public visibility of women in art. The idea seems to suggest a journey from hidden to visible, private to public (at least that’s how I read it) but it wasn’t always clear. I’d have welcomed stronger signage to guide the narrative.

One of the most striking moments came in the green-painted printmaking room. Printmaking was historically dominated by men (as everything else back at the time, unfortunately), tied to guilds and workshops that often excluded women. To see women’s hands in engraving, etching, and woodcuts was a small revelation. Printmaking multiplies presence, reaching further than a single canvas, and here it seemed symbolic: women carving out space in a medium where their voices weren’t expected. Nice.

The wall colours throughout (yellow, blue, green, and red) were bold, both in palette and saturation. They definitely set a mood, but sometimes they shouted louder than the paintings. Yellow can be lively but overwhelming; green is calming but here felt heavy; blue is grounding, red is urgent, but together they felt more decorative than interpretive. I love stepping away from the flat white cube of Western display, but I’m not sure the colours here always supported the works.

The labels were just as uneven. Some gave the historical depth I was craving, placing women’s work in wider networks of influence and resilience. But too many simply described what was on the canvas: a married woman, a widow, a member of society. Why keep underlining civil status when the whole point is to look beyond it? What I wanted was a sharper voice explaining why these artists mattered as artists, what they were defying, how they were pushing boundaries in their own time. I only got small glimpses of that.

Still, the exhibition is an important excavation. It shows that women were painting, sculpting, and printmaking centuries ago, even when the structures around them tried to erase their presence. The works themselves were exquisite. Yes, I’m usually drawn to contemporary art, but the artistry of the past is something I deeply admire and respect. The foundations of what we have now and why, and often "impossible" to replicate today. There’s a quiet challenge in that too. But I left wanting more: more risk, more surprise, more of the overlooked and forgotten. Celebrating a few names is a good step, but if the aim is to really shift art history, the roots need to go deeper.

And here’s the risk: celebrating women artists without interrogating the systems that silenced them can slip into tokenism. It risks becoming a decorative add-on to the canon, rather than a rewriting of it. The show proves that women were always there. The next step is harder: to ask why we didn’t see them and what it would mean to finally centre them, not as exceptions, but as equal authors of art history.