You are here

Icons in Ash: Cremation Portraits

Country:

Categories:

Date: 
Tuesday, 13 December 2016 to Sunday, 7 May 2017
Opening: 
Tuesday, 13 December 2016 - 6:30pm

Keywords:

Ubu Gallery is pleased to announce the debut exhibition of Heide Hatry’s extraordinary new body of work, Icons in Ash: Cremation Portraits. The portrayal of the human image arose many millennia ago precisely for the purpose of keeping the dead among us. Not just in memory, but in charged ceremonial objects that were intended to embody and preserve their spirits for their survivors and for the community as a whole. It was a way of integrating the inexplicable fact of death into life, of insuring that the dead and what they meant stayed present and abided in us. Heide Hatry, an intellectually challenging German visual artist working in New York, has created a new technique and purpose for portraiture, employing actual human ashes to create meditative images of deceased people, either at their own behest or that of their families.

The exhibition is particularly relevant and timely in light of the Vatican’s response on October 25th to what it called an “unstoppable increase” in cremation and its issuance of guidelines barring the scattering of ashes “in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way.” The Vatican decreed that the ashes of loved ones have no place in the home, and certainly not in jewelry. While the Vatican was silent on the use of ashes in painting, we can assume that Hatry’s work falls outside its newly articulated “canonical norms” and within its idea of “unfitting or superstitious practices.”

The project is accompanied by the book publication, Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash, in which twenty-seven contributing authors, including Siri Hustvedt, Lydia Millet, Rick Moody, Mark Dery, Peter Weibel, Eleanor Heartney, Steven Pinker, Hans Belting, Wolf Singer, and Luisa Valenzuela have offered a multiplicity of perspectives on the human relationship to death. These cover a wide range of topics, from art history through anthropology, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, ecology, and beyond, as well as discussing death taboos, post-mortem practices, personal experience, the impact of the relic and more. A social, deeply humanistic, and an aesthetic project, Icons in Ash, proposes an alternative to the way we see and interact with death, in particular a radically different approach to mourning and consolation, as well as to how we understand the purpose of art at its most fundamental level.

The exhibition can be viewed from December 8, 2016 to March 7, 2017 at Ubu Gallery, which is located at 416 East 59th Street in Manhattan. An opening reception will be held on December 13, 2016 from 6:30–8:30PM.

During the run of the exhibition, panel discussions, readings, concerts, conversations, and spoken word performances relating to death, including both participating authors and others, will take place at a number of locations throughout New York City. The events and their details will be announced on both Ubu Gallery’s and the artist’s websites.

For further information or images, please contact Ubu Gallery at 212 753 4444 or email info@ubugallery.com

ARTIST
Heide Hatry

TECHNIQUE
Unlike the traditional means of memorializing the dead in art, these human ash portraits propose an intimate and direct means of engaging their memory, and their substance, rather than the fairly detached, abstract, heroic, or clinical approaches that have typified modern western art and funerary practice. Three different techniques have been used to create slightly different effects:
(a) Loose ash particles from the person depicted (combined with pulverized birch coal and white marble dust) are applied in a painstaking mosaic process into slightly heated beeswax, bedding the ash gently into the wax.
(b) Ink drawings or air-brush paintings are created directly upon a pure and slightly uneven ash surface.
(c) Ink drawings or air-brush paintings are created upon an emulsion of ashes and binder, giving the portrait the feeling and texture of a fresco mural painting.

Artist ( Description ): 

Heide Hatry is a New York based German artist, often described as neo-conceptualist, whose work transforms, transcends, or transgresses the customary relationship of artist to both audience and art. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, and the human exploitation of the natural world. She studied and taught art at various schools in Germany while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. She has curated numerous exhibitions, has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world, has created nearly two hundred artist's books and edited more than two dozen printed books and art catalogs. Skin (2005), Heads and Tales (2009), and Not a Rose (2012) both document her own art and amount to collaborative conceptual artist's books involving some of the most interesting thinkers and authors in the world.

Telephone: 
212-753-4444
Venue ( Address ): 

Founded in 1994, Ubu Gallery has presented more than 75 exhibitions of 20th Century avant-garde art, with an emphasis on the inter-war period of the 1920s-1930s, particularly the Dada, Surrealist, and Constructivist movements. Ubu exhibits paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, and ephemera (books, posters, graphic design, etc.) and, wherever possible, highlights the interrelationships among these art forms.

Ubu Gallery is a well-known presence on the international cultural scene and enjoys a worldwide reputation for its serious explorations of areas covered by few other galleries, including acclaimed survey exhibitions of Polish, Romanian and Czech avant-garde art. Ubu’s focus on the avant-garde, particularly on historically important artists and movements that have not received appropriate attention, has earned the gallery frequent reviews in press throughout the world focused on the visual arts. Ubu participates in the most important Parisian art fair, FIAC, held annually in the Grand Palais, as well as the encyclopedic Frieze Masters fair showcasing the best of antiquities to modern art, in Regent’s Park in London.

Other events from Ruonan Yan

view
The Illusion and Reality
02/07/2019 to 02/21/2019
view
Heide Hatry: Material Reality
11/28/2017 to 12/02/2017
view
Panel: Material Reality
11/28/2017
view
Material Reality
11/28/2017

Pages

 

Related Shows This Week

view
Expoziție de pictură Ioan Avrămuț
03/28/2024 to 04/14/2024
view
GODDESSES, AMAZONS, and MOTHERS | A Celebration of Female Creativity | Group Exhibition
03/08/2024 to 04/12/2024
view
Zhang Zhaohui: Rethinking Ink
03/22/2024 to 04/05/2024
view
LORI COZEN-GELLER ||| THE HUMAN CONDITION
10/18/2023 to 12/16/2024
view
Connections VIII: Artists Selecting Artists
03/26/2024 to 04/13/2024
view
Art of Freedom 2
03/18/2024 to 04/07/2024
view
Miracle Island - Paintings by KK Kozik
03/30/2024 to 05/12/2024
view
New Exhibition Opening: Taking Liberties, Jason Willaford
03/30/2024

Pages