MARSIE, EMANUELLE, DAMON, AND ANDREW SCHARLATT, HANNAH WILKE COLLECTION & ARCHIVE, LOS ANGELES, AND ALISON JACQUES GALLERY, LONDON. OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MUSEUM IN WROCŁAW, POLAND
BLOUINARTINFO.COM | MARCH 2016 ART+AUCTIONWilke, who in some respects was first
known for her relationship to early Pop
art, crossed back and forth between
object making and performance art. She
consistently played with her identity
both as a subject and as a kind of object,
and in the early 1970s she began a series
of works that reflected her own sense of
her psyche and her body. Mellow Yellow,
1975, is among the more ambitious works
from her “Blossoms” series, from which
we are showing five individual pieces. It is
a very powerful representation of Wilke’s
changing relationship to materials—she
is using latex as a kind of metaphor for
skin and the body. As a series, “Blossoms”
is significant as unstructured sculptures
that fold away like flower petals while
simultaneously representing genitalia.
The series references Georgia O’Keeffe
and her works from the 1920s, where
flowers and the human body were foldedHANNAH WILKE
together in works that were neither
purely abstract nor purely figurative. In
some ways, those works are O’Keeffe’s
most intimate, and I think the same can
be said of Wilke’s “Blossoms” series. —PSHannah Wilke had a bodily orientation
in her practice. She studied ceramics,
and some of her earliest work is of ceramic
labial folds. These are small, but there’s
a real presence to them, a symbiotic
relation between body and object. Mellow
Yellow, one of the larger works from the
“Blossoms” series, is made of cut-out
latex folds that are held together with
metal snaps on a board, so there’s an
overlay between what’s considered to be
a soft material and the metallic, shiny
material of the snap. There’s almost a
fabriclike quality to them, but they’re also
like hanging folds of skin. Part of Wilke’s
interest in this work comes from herinvestment in feminist ideologies and
histories, and making work from a
woman’s vantage point. She began using
latex in the early 1970s; she would
make thin sheets of pigments and then
assemble them to make these flowering
forms. They are very vaginal and they
hang on the wall, and yet it’s a fragmented
body—it’s not an entire representation
of the body, it’s not literal, it’s not
figurative. It’s a very abstracted and
fragmented way of representing the body.
Wilke was making abstract sculptural
forms without overtly representing
the body, and yet she had an investment
in feminist politics in a way that many
artists in the show did not. She was very
much a part of feminist communities
in New York and Los Angeles, so it’s
interesting to have her in this exhibition
that is not about overt feminist content.
—JS73