Contemporary Artists Are Liberating the Body from Restrictive Ideals

On view at Goldsmiths CCA through September 3rd, “Unruly Bodies” features 13 women and nonbinary artists dealing with these themes. The exhibition explores 21st-century embodiment, focusing on the abject and grotesque. A blood-red painting by Camille Henrot, What Did You Say? (2019), shows a mother enveloping her baby, with its head half consumed by her snake-like mouth; while Shadi Al-Atallah paints themself in physical conflict. Their work I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts (2023) conveys oppositional emotional states through movement inspired by the queer ballroom scene and traditional folkloric dance from African diasporic communities in the Arabian Peninsula.

Elsewhere in the show, Ebecho Muslimova portrays Fatebe, her nude alter ego, in a series of exaggerated, cartoonish works. Fatebe’s body is stretched and squeezed to extreme angles, but her face has a joyfully fiendish smile throughout.

Curator Natasha Hoare’s starting point in the selection of works was the ecstatic abandon of Galli’s 1980s paintings, which drip with gore. “They are full of these abstracted limbs simmering with violence, with centaur-like figures,” said Hoare. “They struck me as such contemporary images, which led to the question of why the body is often depicted as grotesque or abject. The unruly body in art tries to elicit a strong reaction in the viewer, like a punch in the gut.”

Blurred boundaries are a recurring theme. “It’s plurality and ambiguity,” she said. “There’s this idea of crossing a border in terms of sexuality, gender, and identity. But also, crossing the border of the skin to allow interiority to shine forth.”

This resistance to categorization can be found in many other contemporary artists’ work depicting the body. Ambera Wellmann blurs the outer limits of gender ambiguity in her paintings, depicting abstracted bodily forms in moments of passion and aggression. Her works revel in the fleshiness of the human body, in all its vulnerability and sensuality. “Antipoem,” her current show at Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, draws parallels between her depictions of the body as fragmented and poet Anne Carson’s translations of work by the Greek poet Sappho, which is formed with missing passages.

“Antipoem” features a new cycle of minotaur paintings which merge power and fragility, depicting the mythical creature’s brawny body disintegrating into darkened scenes. As with many of Wellmann’s works, these paintings convey the unbounded potential of the queer body and take ownership of the monstrosity projected onto it. The minotaur—part human, part bull—speaks to the body’s shapeshifting potential.

Fragmented bodies, however, are fallible: a theme taken on by a current group show at London gallery Gathering. “Support Structures,” featuring 18 cross-generational artists and duos interrogating the human body in relation to the systems that surround it. The exhibition includes Louise Bourgeois, Phyllida Barlow, Nam June Paik, and more, and many of the pieces radically envision the body outside of society’s pervasive ableism.

“My work speaks of the body under pressure as it undergoes the process of transformation, from a porous state of being to pure density, stone, and ultimately dust,” said Ivana Bašić, whose visceral sculptures combine fleshy forms with steely, human-made structures. The inevitable decay of the body is inherent in her work, but so is the freedom promised by the loss of wholeness.

“The entities in my work are usually in the process of transitioning into a different state of being: the disembodied state,” she said. “The piece in ‘Support Structures’ is suspended, in the process of ascending. That last contact with the Earth, where its feet are barely touching the floor, is charged with feelings of profound sadness but also unfettering and hope. The reduction or disintegration of the body is not a loss, but a moment of radical potential. It is an act of liberation from the material order and its constraints.”

Rafał Zajko positions the body in relation to technology through the lens of labor. For “Support Structures,” he reflected on his grandparents’ work in Soviet-era factories with two works inspired by jacquard looms, which could be seen as precursors to contemporary computers with their binary systems. Clay, one of Zajko’s favoured materials, is often used as a conductor and insulator within electronic equipment. These pieces are created from ceramics and prosthetic flesh, highlighting the thematic interplay between natural and human-made substances in factory settings.

In an interview, Zajko explained his unexpectedly positive view of factory labor. “I used to spend a lot of my childhood afternoons as an ‘honorary worker’ at the Fasty Fabric Factory in Bialystok, Poland, where my grandparents, who raised me, worked,” he said “For me, factory settings are very tender and intimate. Those factory workers spent most of their life in halls filled with machines and equipment. They cared about their surroundings; they looked after one another as if they were family.”

Taking a central position in the show, Berenice Olmedo’s sculptures suggest the presence of human forms through items of clothing such as ballet shoes and orthopedic apparatus. Her pieces in “Support Structures” are inspired by working in an orthopedic workshop in Mexico, their specific shapes and gestures informed by its experts. “The orthotist Rogelio Soto has been decisive as co-author,” she said. “The balance of several sculptures has been determined by implementing the analysis that he would do for a person.”