BODY SPLITS - groups show at SALTS

14 June — 24 August 2019

Nina Beier, Morgan Courtois, Jesse Darling, Cathy Josefowitz, Judith Kakon, Oliver Laric, Kris Lemsalu, Julie Monot, Pakui Hardware, Puppies Puppies, Mia Sanchez, Dorian Sari, Diamond Stingily Curated by Samuel Leuenberger and Elise Lammer, assisted by Simon Würsten Marin

To celebrate its tenth anniversary, SALTS is proud to present the work of thirteen artists in an exhibition that invites the public to think about the body in new ways. For a long time, artists have challenged the traditional image of the body, both as subject and object, to explore and reflect upon identity. In recent years, we have been witnessing a shift in the representation of the body in artistic practices, supported, among other by a resurgence of figuration in painting, sculpture and other media. This is visible among a generation of artists who approach the body–sometimes dismembered, distorted, augmented, remodelled, absent– as a way to explore questions both personal and political.

CATHY JOSEFOWITZ – Room 1 Born in New York in 1956 Cathy Josefowitz was an artist trained as a painter, but also as a performer and choreographer. Among others, she worked with Mary Fulkerson, one of the founders of the “anatomical release technique”, a holistic method which emphasised the mutual influence of the mind and the body in devising movement. Most notably, she also studied with Steve Paxton, one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater with Trisha Brown in the 1960s. Josefowitz’s thorough knowledge of performance always played a significant role in her paintings and drawings, with the artist translating notions of time and space onto canvas and paper. In the late 1970s Cathy Josefowitz produced in notebooks a series of portraits and self-portraits with pastel. Having from an early age struggled with the image of her own body, Josefowitz’s paintings and drawings were often ‘performed’ as substitutes to dance, the medium potentially granting the most freedom, according to the artist. Like a ’conceptual’ outlet, drawing allowed the artist to play with bodies free of any physical and psychological hindrance. Deeply symbolic, the series on display at SALTS shows human bodies whose disconnected and entangled limbs make them dysfunctional, yet their expressive positions also translate a state of emotional conflict.

ROOM 1