Body Artists

Rebecca Horn:

Horn is most well-known for the way she extends the body in her art. This usually consists of her performing these extensions, and they are recorded with film or photography. Many things that she does either attaches to the body to make it seem as if it could do more than we can already, and some of the ‘costumes’ she creates actually inhibit the body. She plays with the idea of our body and the space around us. She also does very feministic sculptures that will represent either a woman’s breasts or reproductive organs.



Unicorn, 1970





High Moon, 1991



Rachel Whiteread:

Whiteread is most known for her sculptures that are casts of the inside of spaces. She actually won the Turner Prize for casting the inside of chairs and removing the chairs. This pertains to the body immensely. It is almost ghost like and it completely transforms the idea of space. It is the space of a person, a space that a person is supposed to be in, and I think that leaves interpretation for any story that someone can feel when looking at her work. She even does entire spaces of the inside of houses!

Sixteen Spaces, 1995

House, 1994

Stairs, 2001

Louise Bourgeois:

Bourgeois started with drawings and eventually came to sculpting. Her work relates to the body because she mainly focuses on the sexuality of male and female bodies. The female and male bodies are almost always references in her work. Most of these anthropomorphic shapes are quite organic in nature and sometimes a sheer slap in the face surprise.

Arch of Hysteria, 1993

Janus Fleuri

Nick Cave:

Cave works with a sort of extension of the body. The costumes that he makes are certainly shocking and incredible pieces. When they are still they tell a different story than when there is a person inside moving the costume.

Janine Antoni:

Antoni does a lot of sculpture and performance art, and sometimes both at the same time. Part of her motivation for doing these works that pertain to the body is the idea of using her own body. She has eaten giant cubes of chocolate and lard, washed a soap bust of her face, liked a chocolate bust of her face, trained for tight rope walking, and dipped her hair in paint and painted an entire floor with just her hair. By knowing her own body and making herself do crazy things such as the above, she really learns herself. She takes everyday activities and turns them into something to learn from.

Saddle, 2000

Eureka, 1993

2038, 2000

Loving Care, 1993

Lick and Lather, 1993

Touch, 2002