Heide Hatry
Encyclopedia
Heide Hatry is a New York
-based German neo-conceptual artist, curator
and editor
. Her work, often either body-related or employing animal flesh and organs (cf: bio-art), has aroused controversy and has been considered horrific, repulsive or sensationalist by some critics, while others have hailed her as an "imaginative provocateur", "a force of nature…, an artist and a humanist who is making a selfless contribution to life," and an artist whose works provoke a "reaction akin to having witnessed a murder."
Her work bears conceptual (and material) similarities to that of Joseph Beuys
, Damien Hirst
, Dieter Roth
, Jana Sterbak
, and Louise Bourgeois
.
. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. Later she studied painting, printing, photography, and sculpture at various art schools including Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart
and Pädagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg
, as well as art history at the University of Heidelberg.Her father Paul Schmid died in 1993 under dramatic circumstances by drowning in a liquid manure`s tank on their farmyard in Holzgerlingen. After her divorce from Thomas Hatry she left Heidelberg and had to leave behind her minor aged daughter because she lost custody for her. After many years teaching painting while working in the antiquarian book trade, she moved to New York in 2003 and began her career as a visual artist.
in October, 2004 and consisted of a diverse group of paintings, objects and unique books, with an emphasis on new work that would eventually become part of her book project entitled SKIN.
In addition to being the documentation of several years of work with a highly eccentric art material, SKIN is a complex and thoroughly-conceived conceptual project in which Hatry plays on the fact that skin is the medium through which individual identity
is most commonly received. The seven female artists all working with skin as a medium are in fact seven facets of Hatry herself. In the catalogue, she fragments her own biography and accordingly distributes aspects of the work among seven individuals, each of whose personal experience would lend relevance to the particular relationship she bore to the work created under her name. Hatry prevailed upon nine art historians, critics, curators and thinkers (Susanna Partsch, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Renée Vara, Michael Amy, Elsbeth Sachs, Cornelia Koch, Christoph Zuschlag, Veronica Mundi and Hans Gercke) to participate in the project, maintaining the conceit and treating each of their subjects as unique, living, artists. Hatry created an artist portrait for each of her individual "selves" using prosthetics and make-up, in a manner akin to the work of Cindy Sherman
.
At least one of these portraits has itself become a recognizable contemporary feminist icon (cf: Betty Hirst). During several events relating to the exhibition, Hatry or an actress she engaged would play the role of one or more of her fictional selves.
The book is characterized by mis-direction and deception of many sorts and on various levels, including reference to non-existent artists, books, and passages in (real) books, misquotation, illusory footnotes, false attribution, and pseudonymy, including dissembling gender identities, while nevertheless forwarding legitimate critical theses.
The art which SKIN documents is of a very diverse character, including sculptural objects, some of a realistic nature, some invoking comparison to African or Etruscan masks or statuary, two-dimensional abstract constructions, paintings in blood, and paintings treating art-historical subjects seen through a film of animal bladder or translucent skin, reminiscent of certain work by Doris Salcedo
, and creating the impression of a heightened realism, a portrait actually "in the flesh."
Hatry was the first artist to use untreated pigskin and other animal parts to create realistic depictions, chiefly sculptural, of the human visage, sometimes of a character suggestive of renaissance art. She has experimented with numerous preservation techniques, including the now-famous "plastination
" method of the prominent pathologist, and impressario Gunther von Hagens
.
The exhibition for which SKIN served as the putative catalogue, significantly avant la lettre, was mounted in numerous private and public venues in the United States and Europe.
Her second large-scale project, Heads and Tales, was also documented in a book, published in English by Charta in 2009.
Heads and Tales is a collaborative endeavor between Hatry and twenty-seven female authors whom she invited to create "lives" for a series of sculptural busts of women. The often eerie or haunting visages were produced using untreated animal skin, flesh and body parts, and the original objects decayed shortly after their creation. Hatry documented the busts in the photographs, which illustrate the published book. The literary evocations of these women's lives treat a wide range of female experience, but frequently address the violence, abuse, suffering and subordination that Catharine MacKinnon describes in her introduction to the volume as the common lot of women: "Finding a way to be a woman is finding a way to live with fatal knowledge."
Heads and Tales was exhibited in museums and commercial galleries in New York, Cambridge, MA, Los Angeles
, Madrid
, and Berlin
. Hatry's collaborators in the project included Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, Roberta Allen, Jennifer Belle
, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
, Svetlana Boym
, Rebecca Brown
, Mary Caponegro
, Thalia Field
, Lo Galluccio, Diana George, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
, Jessica Hagedorn
, Elizabeth Hand, Heather Hartley, Joanna Howard, Katia Kapovich
, Lydia Millet
, Micaela Morrissette, Carol Novack, Julie Oakes, Barbara Purcell, Johannah Schmid, Selah Saterstrom, Iris Smyles, Luisa Valenzuela
and Can Xue.
Between 2004 and 2010, Hatry also created a significant body of performance works, many documented in videos, including "Skin Room," which was performed in the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; "Politics," which was performed on 9/11, 2007 in Central Park
, New York, with a huge American flag made out of pigskin and spattered with blood; and her best-known performance-work, "Expectations," which has been presented at several venues including the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, NY, Brown University, Providence, RI; Studio Soto, Boston
, MA; Kunstverein Nord, Berlin, Germany; and the 10th Barcelona Art Contemporari Festival, Barcelona
.
Hatry has frequently served as a curator. Her numerous solo and group exhibitions have included work by Carolee Schneemann
, Tania Bruguera
, Jana Sterbak
, Zhang Huang, Kate Millett
, Theresa Byrnes, Regina Jose Galindo
, Minette Vari and many others…
She has also edited many books and catalogues, and her own unique artist's books "treating texts by Paul Celan
, Frederic Tuten
, Friedrich Hölderlin
, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Keats
, Samuel Beckett
, Walter Abish
, Jorge Luis Borges
", Franz Wright
, and Robert Kelly
among others, are held in many private and public collections.
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
-based German neo-conceptual artist, curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
and editor
Editor
The term editor may refer to:As a person who does editing:* Editor in chief, having final responsibility for a publication's operations and policies* Copy editing, making formatting changes and other improvements to text...
. Her work, often either body-related or employing animal flesh and organs (cf: bio-art), has aroused controversy and has been considered horrific, repulsive or sensationalist by some critics, while others have hailed her as an "imaginative provocateur", "a force of nature…, an artist and a humanist who is making a selfless contribution to life," and an artist whose works provoke a "reaction akin to having witnessed a murder."
Her work bears conceptual (and material) similarities to that of Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
, Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
, Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth was an Icelandic artist of Swiss German origin best known for his artist's books and for his sculptures and pictures made with rotting food stuffs. He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot....
, Jana Sterbak
Jana Sterbak
Jana Sterbak is a Canadian artist best known for her works constructed from meat. Two sculptures, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic and Chair Apollinaire , were both works whose primary medium was cured flank steak also known as skirt steak in the UK butcher trade.Born in Prague,...
, and Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois , was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman...
.
Biography
Hatry grew up on a farm in the outskirts of HolzgerlingenHolzgerlingen
Holzgerlingen is a municipality in the German Federal State of Baden-Württemberg. It is located in district of Böblingen.-Geography:Holzgerlingen, with its population of 12,700, lies in a clearing in the Schönbuch, a large forest in the state of Baden-Württemberg. It is south of the city of...
. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. Later she studied painting, printing, photography, and sculpture at various art schools including Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
and Pädagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...
, as well as art history at the University of Heidelberg.Her father Paul Schmid died in 1993 under dramatic circumstances by drowning in a liquid manure`s tank on their farmyard in Holzgerlingen. After her divorce from Thomas Hatry she left Heidelberg and had to leave behind her minor aged daughter because she lost custody for her. After many years teaching painting while working in the antiquarian book trade, she moved to New York in 2003 and began her career as a visual artist.
Art career
Her first solo show took place at Volume Gallery in ChelseaChelsea, Manhattan
Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, 30th Street to the north, the western boundary of the Ladies' Mile Historic District – which lies between the Avenue of the Americas and...
in October, 2004 and consisted of a diverse group of paintings, objects and unique books, with an emphasis on new work that would eventually become part of her book project entitled SKIN.
In addition to being the documentation of several years of work with a highly eccentric art material, SKIN is a complex and thoroughly-conceived conceptual project in which Hatry plays on the fact that skin is the medium through which individual identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
is most commonly received. The seven female artists all working with skin as a medium are in fact seven facets of Hatry herself. In the catalogue, she fragments her own biography and accordingly distributes aspects of the work among seven individuals, each of whose personal experience would lend relevance to the particular relationship she bore to the work created under her name. Hatry prevailed upon nine art historians, critics, curators and thinkers (Susanna Partsch, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Renée Vara, Michael Amy, Elsbeth Sachs, Cornelia Koch, Christoph Zuschlag, Veronica Mundi and Hans Gercke) to participate in the project, maintaining the conceit and treating each of their subjects as unique, living, artists. Hatry created an artist portrait for each of her individual "selves" using prosthetics and make-up, in a manner akin to the work of Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
.
At least one of these portraits has itself become a recognizable contemporary feminist icon (cf: Betty Hirst). During several events relating to the exhibition, Hatry or an actress she engaged would play the role of one or more of her fictional selves.
The book is characterized by mis-direction and deception of many sorts and on various levels, including reference to non-existent artists, books, and passages in (real) books, misquotation, illusory footnotes, false attribution, and pseudonymy, including dissembling gender identities, while nevertheless forwarding legitimate critical theses.
The art which SKIN documents is of a very diverse character, including sculptural objects, some of a realistic nature, some invoking comparison to African or Etruscan masks or statuary, two-dimensional abstract constructions, paintings in blood, and paintings treating art-historical subjects seen through a film of animal bladder or translucent skin, reminiscent of certain work by Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo is a Colombian-born sculptor.Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980, before traveling to New York, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad...
, and creating the impression of a heightened realism, a portrait actually "in the flesh."
Hatry was the first artist to use untreated pigskin and other animal parts to create realistic depictions, chiefly sculptural, of the human visage, sometimes of a character suggestive of renaissance art. She has experimented with numerous preservation techniques, including the now-famous "plastination
Plastination
Plastination is a technique or process used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most properties of the original sample....
" method of the prominent pathologist, and impressario Gunther von Hagens
Gunther von Hagens
Gunther von Hagens is a controversial German anatomist who invented the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens called plastination.-Early life:...
.
The exhibition for which SKIN served as the putative catalogue, significantly avant la lettre, was mounted in numerous private and public venues in the United States and Europe.
Her second large-scale project, Heads and Tales, was also documented in a book, published in English by Charta in 2009.
Heads and Tales is a collaborative endeavor between Hatry and twenty-seven female authors whom she invited to create "lives" for a series of sculptural busts of women. The often eerie or haunting visages were produced using untreated animal skin, flesh and body parts, and the original objects decayed shortly after their creation. Hatry documented the busts in the photographs, which illustrate the published book. The literary evocations of these women's lives treat a wide range of female experience, but frequently address the violence, abuse, suffering and subordination that Catharine MacKinnon describes in her introduction to the volume as the common lot of women: "Finding a way to be a woman is finding a way to live with fatal knowledge."
Heads and Tales was exhibited in museums and commercial galleries in New York, Cambridge, MA, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. Hatry's collaborators in the project included Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, Roberta Allen, Jennifer Belle
Jennifer Belle
Jennifer Belle is an American novelist, based in New York City.She attended Bronx High School of Science and dropped out of college. She has also written columns for Ms. magazine. In 1996, she published her first book, Going Down, telling the story of a woman in her 20s, a topic that would appear...
, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art...
, Svetlana Boym
Svetlana Boym
Svetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright and novelist. She is also an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her current work is focused on...
, Rebecca Brown
Rebecca Brown
Rebecca Brown may refer to:* Rebecca Brown , aka Ruth Bailey, Christian author* Rebecca Brown , former Australian breaststroke swimmer* Rebecca Brown , fictional character from the Australian drama, Sea Patrol...
, Mary Caponegro
Mary Caponegro
Mary Caponegro is an American experimental fiction writer whose collections include Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. Her stories appear regularly in Conjunctions and in other periodicals...
, Thalia Field
Thalia Field
Thalia Field is an American writer and editor known for interdisciplinary multimedia collaborations. She teaches experimental fiction and performance at Brown University. She has published three books of experimental writing and prose poetry with New Directions Publishing, most recently Bird...
, Lo Galluccio, Diana George, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer and interviewer active in the field of contemporary art and culture. She is on the School of Visual Arts faculty, active in the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Program, the art history program, and the masters computer art and film programs...
, Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn is a Filipino-American playwright, writer, poet, storyteller, musician, and multimedia performance artist.-Biography:...
, Elizabeth Hand, Heather Hartley, Joanna Howard, Katia Kapovich
Katia Kapovich
Katia Kapovich is a Russian poet now living in the United States. She writes in both Russian and English.-Life and career:...
, Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart was short-listed for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award...
, Micaela Morrissette, Carol Novack, Julie Oakes, Barbara Purcell, Johannah Schmid, Selah Saterstrom, Iris Smyles, Luisa Valenzuela
Luisa Valenzuela
Luisa Valenzuela is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in...
and Can Xue.
Between 2004 and 2010, Hatry also created a significant body of performance works, many documented in videos, including "Skin Room," which was performed in the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; "Politics," which was performed on 9/11, 2007 in Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
, New York, with a huge American flag made out of pigskin and spattered with blood; and her best-known performance-work, "Expectations," which has been presented at several venues including the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, NY, Brown University, Providence, RI; Studio Soto, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, MA; Kunstverein Nord, Berlin, Germany; and the 10th Barcelona Art Contemporari Festival, Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
.
Hatry has frequently served as a curator. Her numerous solo and group exhibitions have included work by Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the...
, Tania Bruguera
Tania Bruguera
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and performance artist, trained at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bruguera's work pivots around issues of power and control....
, Jana Sterbak
Jana Sterbak
Jana Sterbak is a Canadian artist best known for her works constructed from meat. Two sculptures, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic and Chair Apollinaire , were both works whose primary medium was cured flank steak also known as skirt steak in the UK butcher trade.Born in Prague,...
, Zhang Huang, Kate Millett
Kate Millett
Kate Millett is an American lesbian feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millet is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.-Career:...
, Theresa Byrnes, Regina Jose Galindo
Regina José Galindo
Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan performance artist who specializes in body art. She was born in Guatemala City.-Performances:She first gave two performances in Guatemala in 1999, and gained international fame...
, Minette Vari and many others…
She has also edited many books and catalogues, and her own unique artist's books "treating texts by Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
, Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March , Tallien: A Brief Romance , Tintin in the New World: A Romance , Van Gogh's Bad Café and The Green Hour – as well as one book of inter-related short...
, Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his...
, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Walter Abish
Walter Abish
Walter Abish is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories.-Biography:Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda . At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949...
, Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
", Franz Wright
Franz Wright
-Background:Wright graduated from Oberlin College in 1977. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category....
, and Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly
-Media:* Robert Kelker-Kelly , American soap opera actor* Robert Kelly , American standup comedian* Robert Kelly , American poet...
among others, are held in many private and public collections.
Selection of Books and Catalogues
- HATRY, Heide (Ed.): One of a Kind, Unique Artist's Books, Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2011.
- HATRY, Heide: Heads and Tales. Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2009.
- HATRY, Heide (Ed.): Meat After Meat Joy. New York and Cambridge, MA: Daneyal Mahmood Gallery and Pierre Menard Gallery, 2008.
- HATRY, Heide (Ed.): Carolee Schneemann. Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2007.
- HATRY, Heide: Skin. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2005.