“Exaggeration is Twice as Real”
A catalogue essay for the exhibition Wild Exaggeration: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary Art, Haifa Museum of Art
June 2009 – January 2010
Catalogue (designed by Koby Barchad and Noa Shwartz): 112 pages, 35 artist texts, additional essay by Sara Cohen Shabot (“Notes on the Grotesque Body”), color plates
The exhibition featured works by contemporary Israeli and international artists, who address the grotesque body – a radicalized, distorted, ridiculed body which exceeds its own boundaries, whose parts are ill-matched. This hybrid body is often identified as monstrous. As part of the elaborate discourse about body representations in contemporary art, the grotesque has acquired a metaphorical significance as representative of the zeitgeist. The grotesque body was presented as an allegory and a critique of a disorderly, flawed reality characterized by excess and lack of hierarchy.
“Exaggeration is Twice as Real”
A catalogue essay for the exhibition Wild Exaggeration: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary Art, Haifa Museum of Art
June 2009 – January 2010
Catalogue (designed by Koby Barchad and Noa Shwartz): 112 pages, 35 artist texts, additional essay by Sara Cohen Shabot (“Notes on the Grotesque Body”), color plates
The exhibition featured works by contemporary Israeli and international artists, who address the grotesque body – a radicalized, distorted, ridiculed body which exceeds its own boundaries, whose parts are ill-matched. This hybrid body is often identified as monstrous. As part of the elaborate discourse about body representations in contemporary art, the grotesque has acquired a metaphorical significance as representative of the zeitgeist. The grotesque body was presented as an allegory and a critique of a disorderly, flawed reality characterized by excess and lack of hierarchy.
Installation view
