Orlan
dal 11/4/2008 al 16/5/2008
Segnalato da
11/4/2008
Orlan
Galerie Michel Rein, Paris
Self-Hybridations Indienne-americaines. These digital photographs, made from portraits of Indians, resulted from her stay in the United States, and conjure up both the history of America and the history of American art. Her artistic research involvs themes focusing on the body, sacredness, femininity, beauty, and hybridization.
Galerie Michel Rein is showing the new series of ORLAN’s self-hybridizations. These
digital photographs, made from portraits of North American Indians painted by George
Catlin, resulted from her stay in the United States, in New York and at the Getty
Research Institute in Los Angeles. ORLAN is carrying on her research into bodily and
facial modifications by way of images that are powerful both by their format (152.4
x 124.4 cm) and by their wealth of colour. These new images show us an undertaking
to do with photographic pictoriality made possible by digital retouching. The
artist’s presence is heightened through the sacred, hieratic figures of the first
Native Americans. In her new works ORLAN conjures up both the history of America and
the history of American art.
The self-hybridizations produced since 1998 pursue the dynamics of an approach
introduced in the late 1960s involving themes focusing on the body, sacredness,
femininity, beauty, and hybridization. In exploring the possibilities of
transformations made possible by the new technologies (video, data
communications, graphic palettes, digital retouching) ORLAN has already created two
series of self-hybridizations in which there is a merger of portraits of the artist
and primitive figures, pre-Columbian sculptures and African ethnographic photos. In
the Native-American series, ORLAN changes referent media by developing an interest
in the digitalization possibilities of pictorial subjects.
The Native-American Self-Hybridizations created by ORLAN illustrate a hybridization
of sexes, cultures, periods and artistic praxes, and lend her method a markedly
political dimension that is feminist and open to the world. The artist keeps the
links that she has been forging since the early days of her career with art history
constant. In the Tableaux vivants series, she incarnated Goya’s Maya and Ingres’
Odalisque; she has also produced morphings between her surgery-altered face and
female icons of the Renaissance. After associating her works with western art and
the christian religion, ORLAN decided, in 1998, to broaden her sources to
non-western cultures.
At the turn of the 21st century, ORLAN’s self-hybridizations appear like a hunch, a
premonition about a mutant human species issuing from an ever-growing cultural
intermingling and renewed bio-technological discoveries.
The works in the Native-American Self-Hybridizations series which will be on view at
the gallery were exhibited in 2007 in the retrospective “ORLAN: The Narrative” at
the Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Etienne Métropole (curated by Lóránd Hegyi) and
reproduced in the book published to accompany the show. This retrospective is being
held from 16 April to 18 May 2008 at the Tallinn Art Hall, in Estonia.
Opening 12 april 2008
Galerie Michel Rein
42 rue de Turenne - Paris
Free admission