Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm

Exhibition opening: Friday, February 22, 2019, 7pm
Introduction by Paul B. Preciado (philosopher, curator and transgender activist / Paris)
Party with special guest Aérea Negrot (singer, producer, DJ, performer / Berlin)


About the exhibition
From February 23 to May 5, 2019, the Württembergische Kunstverein presents the first solo exhibition of the artist Lorenza Böttner (born 1959 in Punta Arenas, Chile, died 1994 in Munich) in Germany. Curated by philosopher, curator and transgender activist Paul B. Preciado, this project is co-produced with La Virreina Center de la Imatge in Barcelona, where the first part of this international retrospective was on display until February 2019. In Stuttgart, the exhibition will be shown in an expanded form and with a manifold of additional works.

The work of Böttner, an artist who painted with her feet and mouth and who used photography, drawing, dance, installation and performance as means of aesthetic expression, defies processes of desubjectivation and desexualisation, internment and invisibilisation to which transgender and functionally diverse bodies are subjected. 

Born as Ernst Lorenz Böttner in 1959 into a German family living in Chile, he suffered an accident when he was eight years old which resulted in the loss of both his arms. Educated in Germany, where he moved with his mother after the accident, Lorenz was institutionalised together with the so-called “thalidomide children” and was treated as “disabled.” He rejected the prosthetic arms that would supposedly have rehabilitated his body into one deemed “normal,“ going against the medical diagnosis and social expectations that promised her a future of “social inclusion” as a disabled person. In 1978, she started her studies at the Gesamthochschule Kassel (today the Kunsthochschule Kassel), changing her name to Lorenza Böttner, and further developing her artistic practice of drawing and painting through the incorporation of dance and performance into the process of pictorial production.

Following a first small exhibition of her work in Documenta 14 in Kassel, this is the most complete exhibition of Lorenza Böttner’s work held to date; it presents drawings, pastels, oil paitings as much as a documentations of her performances and her life. Further exhibits are materials around the life of Lorenza as well as her studies around the freak shows and other physically diverse artists such as Frida Kahlo, Thomas Schweitzer, Louis Steinkogler, Django Reinhardts or Aimée Rapin, all from the private archive.

The exhibition is an irreverent and dynamic showcase of the rights of transgender and functionally diverse people, and a journey into the unique, remarkable work of an artist who is destined to become a classic of the 20th century: as an indispensable contribution to the criticism of the normalization of the body and of the social gender.

An exhibition by
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona

Curator
Paul B. Preciado

For more information about the exhibition as well as the discourse and meditaion program, please visit our website.

Press contact
Barbara Mocko
mocko@wkv-stuttgart.de