This drawing is rife with allusions at once ancient and current, religious and personal: a pair of hands impaled with pins recalls both a crucifixion and the acts of willful self-mutilation that characterized 1970s performance art. Indeed, VALIE EXPORT is best known for her work in performance, expanded cinema, and video, though she has turned to drawing during "reflective periods" in which "her search for identity" has driven her practice, she has said. This drawing relates to a concept for the artist's unrealized monument Ort des Menschen (The place of humans), in which a large protective hand emerges from the earth only to have its fingers nailed punishingly back down.
Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, March 14–July 9, 2012.
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VALIE EXPORT
Austrian, 1940–2026 77 works onlineWhen VALIE EXPORT (born Waltraud Lehner) was 13 years old, she wrote in her notebook, “In the beginning was the word and the word was a man.
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