Body Parts
Art that isolates hands, eyes, lips, feet and other fragments of the body.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Isolating a hand, an eye, a mouth or a foot changes how a body is seen. The fragment can be an offering, a study, an erotic fixation or a reminder of violence. Visitors to Greek and Roman healing sanctuaries left terracotta ears, legs and wombs as thanks or petitions, and the colossal head, hand and foot surviving from a statue of Constantine the Great are monuments in themselves.
Artists studying the body often worked in parts. Albrecht Dürer's brush drawing Praying Hands (1508) began as a study for an altarpiece, and Théodore Géricault painted severed limbs obtained from a hospital while preparing The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19). Auguste Rodin treated hands as complete sculptures, as in The Cathedral (1908). Surrealists charged the fragment with desire: Man Ray floated huge red lips over a landscape in the 1930s. Robert Gober's wax legs jut from walls, uncanny and exact.
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