Hannah Villiger

Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) was trained as a sculptor and always considered her work sculpture. Her artistic medium, however, was photography. In the early-1980s Villiger's own body became the focus of her work: it appears fragmented, distorted, twisted beyond recognition. Villiger developed her own unique way of working: Polaroid shots that she enlarged to a size of approximately one square meter (40 x 40 inches). With the Polaroid camera she circled around her own body using the straightforwardness of the medium. The "blindness" of the camera redefined the structure and the volume of her body parts. This first international monograph, with catalogue raisonné, reveals Villiger as a radical predecessor of many of today's artists who create images of their own bodies. In her in-depth essay Claudia Spinelli traces the outlines of Hannah Villiger's personal and artistic development and poignantly examines the crucial relationship between Villiger's life and her work. Griselda Pollock's essay takes a close look at Villiger as a woman and an artist, highlighting the visionary power of the work. Pollock lucidly discusses the problems and obstacles Villiger, as a female-identified artist, had to face in a phallocentric, patriarchal visual culture. David Levi-Strauss ponders the intricate relationship of sculpture, photography and the human body in the work, whose daring and radical formal concepts and innovations remain as cutting-edge as ever.