Vital Signs : Artists and the Body

An impressive and wide-ranging showcase of mostly women and gender-expansive artists whose work intertwines fluid ideas of embodiment with capacious models of abstraction

This stunningly illustrated exhibition catalog looks closely at how abstraction in art is often intimately tied with shifting ideas of the bodily. Bringing together seemingly unalike categories such as figurative/abstract, self/other and exotic/banal into newly fused configurations, the publication shows how artists have often conceived of these categories as inextricably intertwined. The catalog is divided into three thematic sections. “Mirror” explores the ways artists have honed in on the forms of the face and head as a distorted mirror. “Matter” looks at how artists draw on the metaphorical resonances of the body in ways that suggest mutable morphologies, especially in relation to socially constructed definitions of gender, race and sexuality. “Metamorphosis” examines how artists have used abstraction as a means to transform the human body into different modes of being: new identities, other animals and spiritual or cosmological entities. An introductory essay by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation curator, maps the historical precedents from a feminist, queer and Afro-diasporic art historical perspectives, while a prologue by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and a reflection by Lambda Literary Award finalist Cyrus Dunham open up new forms of language for questions around gender and abstraction.
Artists include: Kathy Acker, Jo Baer, Forrest Bess, Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Blondell Cummings, Minnie Evans, Barbara Hammer, Margo Humphrey, Suzanne Jackson, Ted Joans, Frida Kahlo, Bhupen Khakhar, Greer Lankton, Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Carol Rama, Lorna Simpson, Thelma Johnson Streat, Jackie Winsor and more.