Exquisite Corpse" — group exhibition at Pace Berlin

Curated by the artist herself, Loie Hollowell, "Exquisite Corpse" stems from her admiration for the influential Austro-American artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997) and the discovery that this same influence permeates the work of two of her contemporaries, Sascha Braunig and Veronika Pausova—thus bringing together four artists from different generations and continents. The title revisits the 1925 Surrealist game in which each player draws or writes a part of a body on a folded sheet, seeing only the end of the previous contribution—a metaphor that Hollowell considers perfect for describing how artists influence each other over time and distance. Paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by the four artists investigate the body, especially the female body, not as a stable subject, but as a territory of tension that can be stretched, flattened, cut, and transformed, shaped by technology, labor, and scientific developments. Feminism and the very question of what constitutes a feminist image permeate the exhibition in distinct ways: Kogelnik, the oldest of the group, preferred not to identify with the label, while the three contemporaries embrace the term and place the investigation of gender at the center of their practice.