PHOTOS: ISTVAN VIRAG (C) PUNKT Ø / MOMENTUM 9
Patricia Piccinini (AU)
Atlas (2012)
Patricia Piccinini has created a body of work that could easily be regarded as a fantastic world of its own, yet they speak so directly to our physicality that it is hard to look past the internal dialogue they awake. In experiencing it, we are torn between repulsion and fascination, rejection and empathy, or perhaps a sense of humanity and non-humanity.
Her strikingly realistic fleshy sculptures tell stories of the Frankenstein offsprings yet to come and question the borders of creation and manipulation. The shocking anatomy points to a possible future where biotechnical manipulations seem to have blown out of proportion and peculiar shapes of constructed lifeforms had to adapt to our world.
Contemporary science has given us ideas of the body as protean, infinitely malleable and changeable, able to be reformed. The sculpture of the mythological Titan, Atlas, refers to such a body, full of potential but not yet formed. It is an homage to “bodiliness” and a new kind of beauty.
