Body Ego
Dallas Museum of Art
July 12 - September 9, 2018

In 1966, art critic Lucy Lippard organized an exhibition titled Eccentric Abstraction, which brought sculptor Eva Hesse together with seven additional artists pushing the boundaries of Minimalism and marking the emergence of what would later be regarded as Post-Minimalism or Anti-Form. In her accompanying essay, Lippard coined the term “body ego” “in reference to the work’s bodily presence, which was not achieved through representation or allusion, but instead through scale, spatial relation, physical orientation, and material. The presence of “body ego,” Lippard stated, was determined both by the artist’s approach to material and form, as well as by the physical sensation the work elicits for the viewer. Thus the “bodies” Lippard examined, were not those of the artists, but rather the bodies of the viewers and of the sculpture itself. 

 

Spanning from the 1960s to the present, Body Ego includes works by more than ten female artists in the DMA’s collection and considers how abstract sculpture represents the human body, and the ways viewers relate to the objects through their own experiences and perception.

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Curated by Elise Armani, McDermott Intern for Contemporary Art, 2017-2018