CATHY JOSEFOWITZ: RELEASE
Hauser & Wirth presents Release by the Swiss-raised artist Cathy Josefowitz. The breadth of her creative output will be on view in a solo exhibition.
February 1 – May 17, 2024
The presentation takes its title from Josefowitz’s choreographic piece ‘Release’ (1988), a performance replete with fluid movements that is projected on the wall of the gallery. Drawing on the Anatomical Release technique pioneered by dance teacher and choreographer Mary Fulkerson, Josefowitz falls, twists and rolls in order to let go of tension and cultivate creativity, liberating her body and mind. This feeling of liberation is translated into her later works through the gradual shift from figuration to abstraction.
The unnaturalistic colour and vivid brushstrokes of this period, particularly apparent in Josefowitz’s gouches on paper, recall the work of fauvists Henri Matisse and André Derain, who rejected three-dimensionality in their painting practice. Similarly, Josefowitz flattens the body by using a black contour line upon the solid colour plane to portray the profile of the nude figure; yet, Josefowitz challenges the traditional depiction of the reclining nude through her female gaze and contemporary position.
These paintings are complemented by figurative works from the early 1990s in which Josefowitz’s visual language enters a new phase, revealing a different way of working with the body through a shift in pattern, style and form. Using various combinations of oil, gouache, charcoal, pastel or chalk, the artist’s biomorphic subjects reached a new level of simplification, becoming indistinguishable from the chairs on which they rest. ‘Untitled’ (1993) exemplifies this movement towards a more non-representational style, achieved by a focus on shape of the figure and bold planes of colour.
The figurative realm soon gave way to increasing abstraction with Josefowitz’s Prayers series (1998 – 2001). Working on the floor, the series evolved by tracing the outline of a pile of clothes on a canvas, taking particular interest in the shawl. Each canvas started with this new sacred ritual, a kind of dance with the shawl, playing with its shapes on the floor, until she found the composition she liked and traced the outlines.
These are placed in tandem with the similarly monumental Venus series (2004 – 2006). Josefowitz became increasingly engaged in the physicality of creation, intersecting her performative and pictorial practices by working on the floor of her studio instead of the wall. For these works, the artist placed her working uniform on the canvas in a dynamic position and traced around it; the resulting abstracted forms, painted in blocks of colour, express the body’s presence and represent self-portraits.
Harking back to her work of the 1970s that challenged the traditional male gaze of art history, the Venus series articulates the different configurations a human body can take as a form of both resilience and liberation. In surveying the development and revisitations of the artist’s visual language, this exhibition attests to Josefowitz’s enduring determination to depict the figure in both its anatomical and metaphysical dimensions.