At her death at the age of 22, the American artist Francesca Woodman (1958-81) left behind a bundle of approximately 800 photographs, many of which are in the most renowned museum collections worldwide. In 2011/12 the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art dedicated a retrospective to her. In Germany, however, her work is still largely unknown. In the context of the exhibition “The Geometry of Things”, Yvonne Bialek, curatorial assistant at the GAK, will present her artistic work on the basis of selected works.
Woodman’s latest project is an artist’s book entitled Some Disordered Interior Geometries. The artist used an Italian geometry book as a basis, into which she pasted her photographs, where she commented on the relationship between photograph and formula in handwriting, thus relating her work to the system of geometry. Her world of images shows the human body far from the perfection of ideal figures. Woodman, who mostly depicted herself, always distrusted the assertion that reality could be objectively depicted by photography or geometry. Her work testifies to a critical attitude towards these constructive systems and the desire as an artist to be able to approach the complexity of human existence in visual form.
A lecture to the exhibition “The Geometry of Things”.