page_title: Heide Hatry
section_title: Art career
hierarchical_section_title: Heide Hatry / Art career
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph by Heide Hatry
context_page_description: Heide Hatry is a New York City and Berlin based German neo-conceptual artist, curator
  and editor. Her work, often either body-related or employing animal flesh and organs, 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".
context_section_description: Her first solo show took place at Volume Gallery in Chelsea 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 book, she fragments her own biography and accordingly distributes aspects of the work among seven individuals. Hatry prevailed upon nine art historians, critics, curators and thinkers (Susanna Partsch, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Renée Vara, Michaël 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 animal 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 impresario 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 and Hatry’s “own” contribution, a performance was documented by Cosmoto.
  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 pig 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 including New York, Cambridge (US), Los Angeles, Madrid, and Berlin. Hatry's collaborators in the project included Jennifer Belle, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Svetlana Boym, Rebecca Brown, Mary Caponegro, Thalia Fiel
caption: Betty Hirst, Photograph, 2005
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