Nude or Naked at Art Cologne?
Entrance to Art Cologne 2017
Nobody literally got naked at this year’s Art Cologne…not whilst I was there in any case! However, I did see a lot of skin – in the art. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an official theme running through Art Cologne 2017.
In everything from performance art to photography, the unclothed body is ever present in the art world. I was curious to see how gallerists at a major art fair have chosen to curate their stands with works featuring the human body this year.
The collection of artworks represented here is therefore my personal exploration, without really focusing or knowing the artists’ actual intention with the artwork.
Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Akt alt Santa Cruz, 2007, acrylic and soot on canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Galerie Andrea Caratsch
Stephan Balkenhol, Venus, 2016, cedar wood, sold by Galerie Jochen Hempel
In art terms, nudity is very often debated against nakedness. But what exactly is the difference between the two, if any? Churned time and time again in everything from art classes to journalism, the popular but simplified answer is that nudes represent an idealisation of the body. Being naked signifies something bare, unfiltered or even shameful.
Balkenhol’s work above, “Venus” looks like a mix of classical statue meets fertility god. Whether or not that’s what he wanted…the work is beautifully symbolic, and to me, a Nude.
Heimo Zoebernig, Untitled, 2016, Bronze, 189 x 49 x 49 cm, Galerie Nagel Draxel
Stella Hamberg, Trance, 2016, Bronze, 90 x 90 x 90 cm, Galerie Eigen + Art
Christoph Ruckhäberle, untitled, 2016, enamel varnish on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, sold by Galerie Kleindienst
I also think some of these works by Heimo Zoebernig, Christoph Ruckhäberle and Stella Hamberg also play with abstraction and symbolic power of an ideal body. Their works make me think of Antiquity.
However, I think it’s too simple to call these contemporary works just Nudes. Without knowing anything about the artists’ intention, this bronze by Zoebernig could also be naked. The nails hammered into this body are like painful memories or the painful truths.
From that point of view, you could see it as the choice of an unclothed body acts like a message about personal struggle, naked without anywhere to hide.
Blurred lines between Naked and Nude
The article Double Exposure by Ann Landi for Artnews is one of many essays which decipher the simplified divisions between Nakedness and Nudity. She rightfully illustrates how the differences between nudity and nakedness are much more layered in today’s art practice.
Many contemporary artists alternate between the two and do not feel the need to “pigeonhole themselves”. Landi invites us to think how the lines between the two have been consciously blurred to various degrees throughout history too.
In far better depth than what I can pretend to do here, I found her writing intelligent for bringing together works from Edouard Manet and Marcel Duchamp with contemporary artists such as Jenny Saville or Mona Kuhn. Artists of the 19th century to artists of today know equally well how to yield their brush to create shock factor with bare skin.
Not to say that all depictions of the unclothed human body need to be negatively shocking. They can be poetically abstract or classically beautiful as well. As Landi explores in her article, some artists don’t even see the point of distinguishing between the two.
Oda Jaune, Baby Blue, 2015, oil on canvas, 140 x 100 cm, sold by Galerie Daniel Templon
Like Kehinde Wiley’s Christ After Lady Macbeth I portrait below, Oda Jaune’s work Baby Blue pictured above is in contrast to the Venus sculpture by Balkenhol. In terms of composition, it’s a brutal riff on the Madonna and child for choice of the starved black child against the plump white woman.
To me personally, it’s Western double standards in aid work and religious superiority in one. And an illustration of the differences between people who have and those who don’t…I think her body is made naked, actually ugly and cruel, next to the starved baby.
Yet at the same time she represents an ideal of bounty and of spiritual purity when seen just as a Madonna figure. Removing the child brings her to be seen Nude, an ode to a kind of perfection.
Jaune might have intended something else, but the painting shocked me for minutes because I saw these different messages jumping out from the canvas.
Kehinde Wiley, Christ After Lady Macbeth I, 2016, oil on canvas, 272,5 x 181 cm, Galerie Daniel Templon
Pieter Hugo, Baihe and Zao, Beijing, 2015-16, from the series Flat Noodle Soup Talk, sold by Priska Pasquer Gallery
Jurgen Teller, Andrej, 2011, C-Print, Endura paper, 188 x 125 cm, Christine König Galerie
With the power of nudity and nakedness, an artist can play with our perception and provokes engagement on often sensitive topics.
The commissioned shoot by Jürgen Teller for Zeit Magazin of the then androgynous male model Andrej is to me loaded with ideas on gender identity. Andrej is for me naked in the portrait, because it’s telling a unapologetic truth about himself. Since 2011, Andrej is known as a beautiful female model Andreja Pejic, rightfully unapologetically herself.
Perhaps Teller meant none of this. It did catch my attention at Art Cologne though because I see it as a relevant illustration of a contemporary issue using an unclothed body to convey a message without being pigeonholed into Naked or Nude. As Ann Landi concludes her article;
“… naked or nude, political or sexual, remote or in-your-face, the body stripped bare will probably always command our attention, in real life and in art.” – Ann Landi
Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Dirty Girl, 2017, oil on wood, 100 x 77 x 8 cm, sold at Galerie Max Hetzler
Naked and Nude at Gallery Weekend
Gallery Weekend in Berlin is on until Sunday 30th April. Go check out Galerie Deschler exhibition Flesicheslust on Auguststrasse 61 if you are in town!