Hannah Wilke

Biography

From the 1970s until her death in 1993, Hannah Wilke produced work that examined sex and sexuality, feminism and femininity, the body and its representation. Working in sculpture, painting, performance, video, and photography, Wilke often used her own body as a means of asserting a specifically female iconography. Wilke's project culminated in the early 1990s with a stark, moving series of photographs of her face and body during her struggle with cancer. In the 1970s and early 1980s Wilke made a series of performance videotapes, in which she often explored issues of gender and power through posturing, posing, and gesture. Other tapes document her performances, such as Through the Large Glass, in which she performs a striptease behind Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wilke uses her own image to confront the erotic representation of the female body in art history and popular culture.

Hannah Wilke was born in 1940 and died in 1993. She studied at the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. Wilke received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wilke has had solo exhibitions at the P.S.1 Institute, New York; Marc Selwyn Fine Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; and the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen.