Navel Gaze

Knees, so close to the frame they appear like mountaintops. Legs crossed and feet intertwined. Feet dangling. A body exposed and explored yet veiled by abstraction and framed by darkness. Together, this quadriptych of photos of cropped, bare limbs enlarged and transferred onto aluminum plates offers a window into Hannah Villiger’s personal exploration. “I feel within me an intense longing for bodies, my eyes and my entire perception are oriented towards human bodies,” the late artist wrote in a journal entry in 1986. “And why is there this longing, desire? Loneliness? Search for meaning?”

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Likely taken alone in the afternoon, nude, curtain drawn, months before her untimely death from heart failure at 45, Villiger’s photograph-sculpture Block, 1997, is a procedural, almost clinical inspection of her own body in a way that makes sense for an artist who began her photography practice bedridden with acute tuberculosis in a hospital room and continued to document herself and her immediate surroundings unflinchingly over the next 20 years: in the bath, stretching nude, feet on the floor or in the air.

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At Meredith Rosen Gallery, two large-scale c-prints from 1980 and 1997 make up a new exhibition titled “Skulptural,” presented in collaboration with the Hannah Villiger foundation. The moment marks the first solo show of Villiger’s work in New York since 1991 and follows a recent retrospective at Centre Pompidou, which featured approximately 100 works and writing that spanned the artist’s practice.

While Villiger’s photographs offer obscure snapshots of her everyday, too up-close to reveal much context, the artist kept over 50 journals, recording her life in sporadic and poetic bursts and perceptive observations. Compiled in an eponymous book by Jolanda Bucher and Eric Hattan and translated by George Frederick Takis soon after her passing, these writings are an intimate companion piece to a layered and at times inscrutable practice. 

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Villiger always viewed sculpture as corporeal and photography as a tool rather than a product. Her early Arte Povera sculptures and installations from the ’70s, like large spears and weapons made from organic materials, gave way to photographs that were first used to document her work. “I made two objects that corresponded to my physical feeling and to my soul. When they were finished, I took pictures of them,” she recounted in a 1979 journal entry. “Now the photographs please me more.” These photographs eventually found their way to the center of her practice as her ideas around sculpture and material became more and more experimental: That is to say, Villiger viewed her bare body as a sculpture and the photographic prints as material to capture it and persevere it. Enlarged and fragmented, these works are curious harbingers of the selfie-era soon-to-come. Uninhibited and abstract, they allowed her to explore her sexuality and mortality through her own figure, refracted to existential ends.

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While hospitalized for acute tuberculosis in 1980, she began to see her environment as material; she drew on the walls and photographed her frail body with a Polaroid from arm’s length. In the next decade, she honed what would become her signature approach: Polaroid self-portraits, enlarged, and transferred onto aluminum plates. The works grew and grew; in the mid-80’s she required that the “photos must be large so that I can get inside them,” as she once wrote. By the late ‘80s, the Swiss artist was arranging multiple works together in Blocks— zoomed-in images of bodies and buildings became puzzle-like reflections of the whole, exaggerated and autonomous.

As her photographs and sculpture morphed into super-sized photograph-sculptures, Villiger was thinking about architecture and the relationship between constructed spaces and the body. When she photographed a building by the architects Herzog & de Meuron for the 1991 Architectural Biennale in Venice, she remarked in her journal, “The moisture, the dampness that is inside the human body is projected by virtue of the fact that it rains on the Schwitterhaus and its surroundings. The belly of the house is my pregnant body. The green streetcar is movement, erotic activity. The light is as neutral as possible, because it is rainy and overcast.”

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Look at any Villiger work long enough and everything becomes a self-portrait, every image of a building or tight frame of a limb. Throughout her practice, she made (but rarely exhibited) plastic works or drawings, and throughout her last two years of her life, she began to make small object models and photographs where the body is eclipsed by clothing. In the spring of 1997, her final works consisted of Polaroids mounted as blocks onto cardboard before she passed away that August.

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“Skulpture” is on view until September 21, 2024 at Meredith Rosen Gallery at 11 E 78th St, New York, NY 10075.