Richard Saltoun Gallery

About the Gallery
Founded in 2012 in London, Richard Saltoun Gallery specialises in Modern and Post-War art, guided by a strong focus on rediscovering the work of important yet under-recognised women artists through presentations at all its locations, online exhibitions, publications, events and participation in art fairs around the world. With three international locations, Dover Street in London, Via Margutta in Rome, and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York, the gallery provides an important hub for discussion, collaboration, and collecting.

About the Presentation
At Independent 20th Century, Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a duo presentation of Baya (1931–1998) and Juliana Seraphim (1934–2005), two pioneering modernists who placed the female gaze at the heart of their work. Though working in different regions—North Africa and the Middle East—both developed highly individual visual languages that challenged dominant portrayals of women in art, offering instead images rooted in female subjectivity, sensuality and inner life.

Baya rose to international fame at just 16, when she held her first solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947. Her vibrant, patterned compositions—filled with women, birds, plants and musical instruments—reimagine North African womanhood on her own terms. Rather than exoticised objects, her female figures exist in joyful, autonomous worlds, often in harmony with nature and each other. Admired by figures such as André Breton and Pablo Picasso, Baya created a practice that was both modern and deeply personal. Her work has been the subject of renewed institutional attention, with a major retrospective at the Sharjah Art Museum (2021) and inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Juliana Seraphim, born in Jaffa and based in Beirut, developed a poetic Surrealist style to explore desire, memory and the subconscious from a distinctly female perspective. Working primarily in ink and watercolour, her layered, dreamlike compositions feature recurring female forms, often intertwined with wings, masks or architectural motifs. Her art challenges the patriarchal norms of the time, presenting femininity as multifaceted, erotic, and emotionally complex. Seraphim represented Lebanon in several international biennials during the 1960s and was recently featured in Arab Presence: Modern Art and Decolonisation at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2024) and The Golden Sixties at the Biennale de Lyon (2022), alongside artists including Etel Adnan and Huguette Caland.