cunt prints 2013

cunt prints – a collec­tion of works:

• Blue Danaé 1 & 2 1998
• cunt prints 2013
• georgy girl 2016
• fanny fans (work in progress)

cunt prints: 2 series of gouache body prints on paper – 30 sheets 24 x 32 cm 

Series 1: 15 prints, gouache colours: medium yellow, leaf green, red orange, blue lake, bril­liant red, on water­colour paper (natural white, acid-free, lightfast)

Series 2: 15 prints, gouache colours: turquoise bluish, crimson, ultra­ma­rine, lilac, burnt sienna

Insur­ance value (30 x 500,00) 15.000 Euros

Framing: maple, glazed white, with spacer strip

The orig­inal cunt prints, series 1 & 2, which were produced on Xmas Eve 2013 are a cele­bra­tion of femi­ninity, at a time in life, when it is appar­ently consid­ered taboo for a woman to flaunt her sexu­ality, to show her colour beyond the menopause.

The inspi­ra­tion came after observing my cunt prints from vaginal fluid and/​or semen on dark shaded bed sheets, some­time during 2011, the year in which I turned 60; and I imag­ined such cunt prints, like finger­prints, an essen­tial part of me, would be impres­sive as a stylised artwork. Like lipstick, lip prints on a servi­ette, collar or, love-letter, these cunt prints are a fleeting sign that one has lived.

Testing the idea out by mentioning it to a couple of male friends in their forties, the reac­tion of exas­per­a­tion from both caused me at first to doubt the cred­i­bility of the project, but it also reas­sured me of the impor­tance of such a femi­nist state­ment. There is a history of body painting and body prints, the most memo­rable being Yves Klein’s blue body prints, of women in the late 50’s early 1960’s.¹

Despite the IKB paint­ings being uniformly coloured, Klein exper­i­mented with various methods of applying the paint; firstly different rollers and then later sponges, created a series of varied surfaces. This exper­i­men­talism would lead to a number of works Klein made using naked female models covered in blue paint and dragged across or laid upon canvases to make the image, using the models as ​“living brushes”. This type of work he called Anthro­pom­etry².³

In her Website blog of 2011, Kirstin Russell, of the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis (USA) cites Yves Klein’s own attempt to explain his use of the female nude:

Certainly the entire body consists of flesh, but the essen­tial mass is the trunk and thighs. It is there that once finds the true universe hidden by our percep­tions.⁴

This is the percep­tion of a male artist who, while creating inno­v­a­tive artwork, did not call into ques­tion the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of a woman by exploiting her for art purposes.

“In 1976 (…) Lucy Lippard addressed the contin­uing broad dismissal of woman’s art work: ​“Men can use beau­tiful, sexy women as neutral objects or surfaces, but when women use their own faces and bodies, they are imme­di­ately accused of narcis­sism”.⁵

With cunt prints a ​“model” creates her own body prints, more­over from between the thighs, where a ​“true universe hidden by our percep­tions” is revealed.

1 This colour, remi­nis­cent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna’s robes in medieval paint­ings, was to become famous as Inter­na­tional Klein Blue (IKB) en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/…

2 For example Anthro­pométrie de l’Époque bleue (2’26)
March 9, 1960
 Galerie inter­na­tionale d’art contemporain
253, rue Saint Honoré, Paris, France www.yveskleinarchives.… ​“Anthro­pom­etry (Greek anthropos (άνθρωπος — ​“man”) and metron (μέτρον — ​“measure”) there­fore ​“measure­ment of man”) refers to the measure­ment of the human indi­vidual” en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/…

3 en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/…

4 Walker Art Center — Femi­nism and Yves Klein’s Anthro­pométries, by Kirstin Russell blogs​.walk​erart​.org/vi…

5 Rebecca Schneider, p. 35 ​“The Explicit Body in Perfor­mance”, New York Rout­ledge 1997, quoted in Performing the Jewish Body in Contem­po­rary Germany by Juli­ette Brungs, 2013, (unpub­lished) disser­ta­tion at the Univer­sity of Minnesota (USA)

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Presen­ta­tion

Solo Exhi­bi­tions

2016 (21.5−30.6) Tanya Ury’s cunt prints 2013 — presented for the first time are 2 framed series of 30 glowing gouache body prints on paper. THANK SHOWS ART in the clothes boutique, Marsil­stein 2, 50676 Cologne (D)

Festi­vals etc.

2016 (21.5.) A perfor­mance of impro­vised poetry and music (Tanya Ury – texts in German and English – Kasander Nilist on double bass) will take place at the opening on 21^st May at 2pm 4pm and 6 pm. THANK SHOWS ART in the clothes boutique, Marsil­stein 2, 50676 Cologne (D)