Mutated Bodies

About

Bodies that swell, split, merge or sprout extra parts have long given shape to sin, terror and fascination. Hieronymus Bosch filled The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510) with half-human hybrids, and the demons that assail Saint Anthony in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16) are blistered and misshapen.

The 20th century turned distortion inward, toward the psyche and the flesh. Hans Bellmer photographed jointed dolls rearranged into impossible anatomies in the 1930s, and Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) sets eyeless, gaping creatures against a harsh orange ground. H. R. Giger's fusions of flesh and machinery shaped the creature in the film Alien (1979). Later artists took their cues from medicine and genetics: Cindy Sherman assembled grotesque figures from prosthetic parts in the early 1990s, and Patricia Piccinini sculpts lifelike hybrid beings that invite tenderness as well as unease.