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Augusta Stylianou Gallery 
Heide Hatry (born 1965) is a New York-based German neo-conceptual artist, curator and editor. Her work, often either body-related or employing animal flesh and organs (cf: bio-art), has aroused controversy and has been considered horrific, repulsive or sensationalist by some critics, while others have hailed her as an "imaginative provocateur",[1] "a force of nature…, an artist and a humanist who is making a selfless contribution to life,"[2] and an artist whose works provoke a "reaction akin to having witnessed a murder."[3] Her work bears conceptual (and material) similarities to that of Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, Dieter Roth, Jana Sterbak, and Louise Bourgeois. Biography Hatry grew up on a farm in the outskirts of Holzgerlingen. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. Later she studied painting, printing, photography, and sculpture at various art schools including Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and Pädagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg, as well as art history at the University of Heidelberg. After many years teaching painting while working in the antiquarian book trade, she moved to New York in 2003 and began her career as a visual artist. Art career Her first solo show took place at Volume Gallery in Chelsea in October, 2004 and consisted of a diverse group of paintings, objects and unique books, with an emphasis on new work that would eventually become part of her book project entitled SKIN.[4] In addition to being the documentation of several years of work with a highly eccentric art material, SKIN is a complex and thoroughly-conceived conceptual project in which Hatry plays on the fact that skin is the medium through which individual identity is most commonly received. The seven female artists all working with skin as a medium are in fact seven facets of Hatry herself. In the catalogue, she fragments her own biography and accordingly distributes aspects of the work among seven individuals, each of whose personal experience would lend relevance to the particular relationship she bore to the work created under her name. Hatry prevailed upon nine art historians, critics, curators and thinkers (Susanna Partsch, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Renée Vara, Michael Amy, Elsbeth Sachs, Cornelia Koch, Christoph Zuschlag, Veronica Mundi and Hans Gercke) to participate in the project, maintaining the conceit and treating each of their subjects as unique, living, artists. Hatry created an artist portrait for each of her individual "selves" using prosthetics and make-up, in a manner akin to the work of Cindy Sherman. At least one of these portraits has itself become a recognizable contemporary feminist icon (cf: Betty Hirst[5]). During several events relating to the exhibition, Hatry or an actress she engaged would play the role of one or more of her fictional selves. The book is characterized by mis-direction and deception of many sorts and on various levels, including reference to non-existent artists, books, and passages in (real) books, misquotation, illusory footnotes, false attribution, and pseudonymy, including dissembling gender identities, while nevertheless forwarding legitimate critical theses. The art which SKIN documents is of a very diverse character, including sculptural objects, some of a realistic nature, some invoking comparison to African or Etruscan masks or statuary, two-dimensional abstract constructions, paintings in blood, and paintings treating art-historical subjects seen through a film of animal bladder or translucent skin, reminiscent of certain work by Doris Salcedo, and creating the impression of a heightened realism, a portrait actually "in the flesh." Hatry was the first artist to use untreated pigskin and other animal parts to create realistic depictions, chiefly sculptural, of the human visage, sometimes of a character suggestive of renaissance art. She has experimented with numerous preservation techniques, including the now-famous "plastination" method of the prominent pathologist, and impressario Gunther von Hagens. The exhibition for which SKIN served as the putative catalogue, significantly avant la lettre, was mounted in numerous private and public venues in the United States and Europe. Her second large-scale project, Heads and Tales,[6] was also documented in a book, published in English by Charta in 2009. Heads and Tales is a collaborative endeavor between Hatry and twenty-seven female authors whom she invited to create "lives" for a series of sculptural busts of women. The often eerie or haunting visages were produced using untreated animal skin, flesh and body parts, and the original objects decayed shortly after their creation. Hatry documented the busts in the photographs, which illustrate the published book. The literary evocations of these women's lives treat a wide range of female experience, but frequently address the violence, abuse, suffering and subordination that Catharine MacKinnon describes in her introduction to the volume as the common lot of women: "Finding a way to be a woman is finding a way to live with fatal knowledge."[7] Heads and Tales was exhibited in museums and commercial galleries in New York, Cambridge, MA, Los Angeles, Madrid, and Berlin. Hatry's collaborators in the project included Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, Roberta Allen, Jennifer Belle, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Svetlana Boym, Rebecca Brown, Mary Caponegro, Thalia Field, Lo Galluccio, Diana George, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Jessica Hagedorn, Elizabeth Hand, Heather Hartley, Joanna Howard, Katia Kapovich, Lydia Millet, Micaela Morrissette, Carol Novack, Julie Oakes, Barbara Purcell, Johannah Schmid, Selah Saterstrom, Iris Smyles, Luisa Valenzuela and Can Xue. Between 2004 and 2010, Hatry also created a significant body of performance works, many documented in videos, including "Skin Room,"[8] which was performed in the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; "Politics,"[9] which was performed on 9/11, 2007 in Central Park, New York, with a huge American flag made out of pigskin and spattered with blood; and her best-known performance-work, "Expectations," which has been presented at several venues including the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, NY, Brown University, Providence, RI; Studio Soto, Boston, MA; Kunstverein Nord, Berlin, Germany; and the 10th Barcelona Art Contemporari Festival, Barcelona. Hatry has frequently served as a curator. Her numerous solo and group exhibitions have included work by Carolee Schneemann,[10] Tania Bruguera, Jana Sterbak, Zhang Huang,[11] Kate Millett, Theresa Byrnes,[12] Regina Jose Galindo, Minette Vari[13] and many others… She has also edited many books and catalogues, and her own unique artist's books "treating texts by Paul Celan, Frederic Tuten, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Keats, Samuel Beckett, Walter Abish, Jorge Luis Borges",[14] Franz Wright, and Robert Kelly [15] among others, are held in many private and public collections. Selection of Books and Catalogues HATRY, Heide (Ed.): One of a Kind, Unique Artist's Books, Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2011.
Notes ^ Robert Shuster. "Introducing Heide Hatry, … Three New York City artists you probably don't know, but should". Village Voice.
Evan J. Garza. "Slideshow: Heide Hatry at Pierre Menard Gallery" The Phoenix
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