Body Art: ORLAN

With this post we start a period in which we will introduce some great artists who have chosen to use the body (often their body) as the “canvas” or the “marble” on which express their creativity or pulsions.

This is an important branch of contemporary art that has its roots in the nature of human being and in the desire to modify the body or to show on it signs that link the person to a wider reality (community, culture, gods, myth…).

Among the artists we represent, it’s sure that Rabarama art is influenced by the attention and focus on the body. She has her peculiar view on the theme and she is agile in changing the subjet to object in a big game of mutation: she could create on her body, with her body, on stone or metal bodies, on others’ bodies.
In this way the subject is present but fades in a different concept of individuality, merging with the billions of possibilities of reality:

BODY ART #1 : ORLAN

Orlan (born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte) is a French artist, born May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne, Loire.She adopted the name Orlan in 1971, which she always writes in capital letters : “ORLAN”. She lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. She was invited to be a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, for the 2006-2007 academic year.She sits on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is a professor at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Cergy-Pontoise.

Although Orlan is best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early to mid-1990s, she has not limited her work to a particular medium.

Official website: http://www.orlan.eu/