[Winter 2022]

Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montréal
29.04.2021 — 19.06.2021

By Fanny Bieth

[Excerpt]
Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm is the first international retrospective exhibition for the Chilean-German artist Lorenza Böttner, a trans person who lost both arms as a child following an accident. Böttner’s practice and life embody, to use the words of philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who curated the exhibition, a “political struggle for recognition and exaltation of [non-normative] life.” This political power shines within a remarkable and prolific body of work exhibited at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in spring 2021.

Requiem for the Norm brought together more than a hundred works and documents testifying to Böttner’s multidisciplinary art practice from when she entered the Gesamthochschule Kassel, in 1978, to her death in 1994, at age thirty-four, following AIDS-related complications. Large-format pastels, pencil and ink drawings, photographs, videos, dance, performance – not only does Böttner’s work involve a multitude of techniques, but her works transcend traditional art disciplines: painting becomes a dance; sculpture, the subject of a performance…
Translated by Käthe Roth.

  
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 119 – AGAINST NATURE ]
[ Complete article and more images, in digital version, available here: Lorenza Böttner — Fanny Bieth ]