128

Hannah Wilke

(American, 1940-1993)

"Untitled"

glazed ceramic
incised signature at bottom, in the original fabric-covered oval box.
box h. 1-3/8", w. 1-7/8", d. 1-3/8"

  • Provenance: Private collection, New Orleans, Louisiana.

    Notes: "Since 1960, I have been 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 namable and at the same time quite abstract." – Hannah Wilke, 1976

    Radical feminist artist Hannah Wilke spent her career boldly confronting the intersection of art and gender. Working across various media – including drawing, sculpture, performance, and photography – she developed a visual language centered on the female body, subverting patriarchal standards in fine art. She often used unconventional materials – a nod to women's historical lack of access to art education – including her own body to stage complex dialogues about female sexuality and agency.

    A native New Yorker, Wilke burst onto the scene in the early 1960s with small, ceramic sculptures resembling vulvas – some of the first explicitly yonic images to appear in the New York art scene amidst the second wave of the women's liberation movement. She later created numerous versions in assorted media including terracotta, latex, and laundry lint. By combining feminist themes with Minimalist aesthetics, she developed an innovative technique for exploring female eroticism at a time when such depictions were rare. The repeated yonic motif became a signature element throughout her work, reappearing in various media and culminating in one of her most iconic photographic series, S.O.S. – Starification Object Series.

    In S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, Wilke merged her body with her signature yonic sculptures, primarily those made of chewing gum: the vulva-like pieces of gum decorate her nude body like scars or welts, disrupting the desirous gaze of the viewer. In the resultant self-portraits of Wilke adorned with her yonic symbols, she posed like a glamorous pin-up model, juxtaposing the alluring imagery with the brutality of scarification, satirizing Western cultural notions of beauty and femininity. This caused an uproar when they were first exhibited in New York in 1974. By merging the materiality of the chewing gum, a disposable product, and the physicality of her own nude body, Wilke underscored such feminist issues as violence against women, harmful beauty standards, and the male gaze.

    Placing her own body as both the subject and the canvas made her work inherently personal and political, and it remained so until the very end. Diagnosed with lymphoma, Wilke turned her final project, Intra-Venus, into a photographic record of her physical decline due to the cancer and its treatment. Returning once more to her body as a canvas, Wilke documented her transformation from midlife happiness to the visible effects of illness and treatment, to her naked body ravaged by cancer, chemotherapy, and surgery, until she is exhausted, balding, and resigned. The monumental color photographs of Intra-Venus mirrored her earlier S.O.S. portraits; Wilke again posed pin-up style, but this time, she was confronting death head-on, refusing to conceal any sign of its impending arrival. With this final act of creation, she urged viewers to consider the ways in which women's bodies are objectified, consumed, and ultimately discarded.

    A pioneer of feminist art, Wilke herself was the center of her artistic practice, using her own image to explore gender inequality, desire, and mortality. Her visual language, composed of feminine forms and symbols across various media, celebrated womanhood and female sexuality in groundbreaking ways for her time. Her visual language spoke to what it meant to live – to love, want, mourn – from within a woman's body. Despite the controversy surrounding her work, Wilke achieved international recognition during her lifetime. She was represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, and her work was acquired by several major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In recent years, her contributions to feminist art have received renewed attention through retrospectives at such institutions as the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, cementing Wilke's legacy as a fearless, feminist trailblazer.
  • Condition: **In overall very good condition.

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