Körperlich

Through their work, these artists pose questions about bodily integrity, about control of the body, asking ultimately who has power and autonomy over our bodies, especially those that are gendered as female.

In some of the works, figures are blurred and fragmented, evoking difficult histories, personal and political conflict or violence. Whereas in Carol Rama’s ‘La guerra è astratta’ (1970) or Alina Szapocznikow’s sculpture of a disembodied mouth indicate the disowned physical self in the face of oppression, Hannah Villiger’s photographic work ‘Skulptural (Sculptural)’ (1986), a simple polaroid of an ear, might reference the last sense to be lost in the dying body, the ultimate fading of our conscious bodily existence.

Irène Zurkinden

Nue (Nude)
1934
Oil on canvas
100 x 53.5 cm / 39 3/8 x 21 1/8 in

The artists presented challenge the tradition of the nude, expressing it often as a fractured, disintegrating and unstable body, as it appears in the watercolour works of Lassnig and the painting by Lozano.

The artists included could be said to engage with the legacies of a Freudian understanding of the unconscious as it is expressed through a desiring body, but their work also anticipates feminist critiques of this concept, for example, through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection – a reminder of the material realities of the (female) body.

Elements of organicism and abjection are explored in relation to the body in the hanging sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Rama’s mixed media canvas from 1969, where the the emphasis is on materiality. In works by Meret Oppenheim, aspects of nature are displayed, incorporating flowers or animal bodies in states of strange or surreal metamorphosis, as seen in ‘Tisch mit Vogelfüssen’ (1939 (executed 1983)).

Together, the artists in this exhibition grasp, investigate and express the complexities of the construction of self that comes from our bodies.