Hannah Wilke (1940 - 1993), Untitled, 1970 Jean Hans Arp (1886-1966), Tête, 1927
Writing in 1976, Hannah Wilke declared that she was “concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female. A new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract.” On the face of it, Wilke’s words evoke a familiar set of Surrealist sensibilities from the prewar era, whereby the human subject is always acknowledged as an erotic one, both intellectual and physical, seductive and menacing. Yet Wilke’s bodies also proved oppositional to the fetishistic, fantastical entities conjured by her male predecessors from Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Hers were literal bodies, organic, visceral and often disturbing to witness.
The exhibition I Object: Hannah Wilke and Her Surrealist Counterparts points out the significant differences between Wilke’s painted and sculpted compositions of biomorphic forms and those of the male protagonists associated with prewar Surrealist tendencies, including Max Ernst, Jean Arp, as well as Yves Tanguy.
On Tuesday, November 17th at 5:00PM, Luxembourg + Co. will host a guided tour led by Simon Preston and Yuval Etgar to mark the opening of the exhibition.