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| Hannah Wilke Sweet Sixteen 1978 |
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Rights (Photo / Work):
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt
The Hannah Wilke Collection &
Archive, Los Angeles
Bildrecht, Wien, 2013
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This work shows vaginally shaped sculptures of ceramic, all of them differing from each other. The sculptures were represented as series or one by one. The female genitals are as a fragment detached from the woman's body. Wilke intended to create a counterpart to the omnipresent phallic symbols[1] for establishing a positive reformulation of the female genitalia.[2] Since the 1960s already, Wilke has sculptured female genitalia in order to relieve them from their negative connotations and to upgrade them to a positive universal symbol.[3] So Wilke was the first artist, even before Judy Chicago, to create a positively connoted visual language "based on the female genitalia"[4]. In response to Freud's notion of "Penis Envy" Wilke created "Venus Envy"[5] with the vulva as the sole and unique topic.
Biography: http://www.hannahwilke.com/id10.html (Translation: K. Seifter) |
