Beauty Out of Damage
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"This exhibition follows the artist's bold exploration of beauty, the human body and identity in her photographs, paintings and sculpture from the 1970s to the present. This retrospective reveals a startling continuum in the artist's work, beginning with her brutal, expressionist drawings as an adolescent and extending to her post-mastectomy investigations of androgyny." "Her project is bold and simple: to show that the body can be beautiful, even in the most conventional ways, after it has been disfigured. She is most effective when she presents herself to us with direct seduction. We are forced to confront the scarred flesh and to admit that Matuschka is very desirable, that sexual power resides in the personality" "Oscar Wilde said one can either make a masterpiece or be one. Artist Matuschka has managed to do both." |
Permanent Public Collections: Musee de l'Elysee Beauty Out of Damage Gallery 1991 - 1995, 2003, 2004
Media: 35 mm negative film Publications: |
Collectors Edition: BEAUTY OUT OF DAMAGE CATALOGUE (New York Times photo included in catalogue) "In a recent Harcourt Brace college text on sociology, the purpose of radical art is defined as 'to raise the subjective dimensions of social problems.' It should be no surprise that his quote appears under Matuschka's 1993 cover of the New York Times Magazine. Matuschka's work is not only radical, but eclectic and experimental, and extends considerably beyond the bounds of the visual frame. To transmit the extent to which her art and her life are a single body-centered process, she has created a combined words-and images catalogue. What unites it all is the energy of Matuschka herself, and her ongoing dialogue with her body and its legacy." |
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