let's play (1-4)

2024, pencil on paper, acrylic glass, screws and nuts
397 x 310 × 58 mm

(...) In her drawings “let’s play 03” and “let’s play 04” on paper, artist Tamara Goehringer foregrounds a feminist perspective on the body: shown from front and back, two female dolls are dissected into their individual components. Innocent facial features and hairstyles collide with oversexualized elements such as oversized, plump buttocks and muscular torsos with stylized pubic areas. Combined with the historical modesty of doll representations from the 18th and 19th centuries, these figures mutate into surreal bodies. In their fragmentation and reassembly, they evoke the fetishized dolls depicted by Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. The pinched seams on the backs of the legs, however, painfully evoke the reality and constraints of female objectification.
The fragmentation of the body is not a phenomenon unique to contemporary art. As Linda Nochlin noted in her 1995 lecture “The Body in Pieces,” the isolated depiction of body parts had already become a symbol of societal and technological upheaval in the 19th century. It reflects an era of multiplicity, fragmentation, and uncertainty. Even today, the isolated representation of body parts resonates with a complex politics of control and fetishization. (...)
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Text by Maja Lisewski for the exhibition um fragile Affären (text translated from German to English)
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