Australian artist and her odd world
A primate-like mutant turns soulful eyes on the viewer — never mind its shoe-sole posterior — in “The Dancer.” A hirsute girl tenderly known as the “The Comforter” cuddles a critter that has the chubby toes of a human infant and a head resembling a cow udder. A long-haired, vaguely female figure leans in, riddled with strange growths (or alien offspring?), in “The Osculating Curve.”
Patricia Piccinini’s world is located somewhere between attraction and repulsion, the fascinating and the grotesque. These and other sculptures, drawings on paper and mixed media works are on exhibit in “We Feel, Conceive or Reason, Laugh or Weep” at Hosfelt Gallery.
Laugh or weep, there’s no shame in this artist’s game: Piccinini has decidedly warm feelings for her progeny.
“I think what I create is beautiful,” she says over the phone from her home in Melbourne, Australia. “I don’t think they’re disgusting. I wouldn’t make work to intentionally turn people away — that’s not me. I can never be a bad boy because I’m a woman. It’s a waste of time, and there’s too much at stake.
“I think my work is almost a social service. I feel like my voice needs to be out there. And it’s not a voice that’s grossing people out, but one that’s very creative.”
At the base of works like “Embryo,” a fiberglass and polyurethane sculpture that resembles a car part curled like a fetus, is Piccinini’s interest in difference, what we consider natural or artificial, and the naturalization of technology.
“Everything in my work is conceivable,” says the artist, who always begins with drawings of images pulled from her imagination. “It’s especially interesting in the context of a place like San Francisco, where the gene-editing technology CRISPR was invented by two brilliant women.”
Piccinini’s work seems like a perfect fit for the Bay Area. “This is a place where people have always come because their ideas seemed outlandish in the rest of the world,” gallery owner Todd Hosfelt observes. “It’s where innovators thrive — a place of technological, scientific, cultural and artistic breakthroughs. Piccinini’s work asks us to consider issues that everyone in the world needs to be thinking about.”
The hybrid creatures also “open up ethical implications,” the artist says, “though not in a didactic way.”
“OK, I don’t chain myself to a tree. I’m doing this in an art context, which is a lot more open-ended, which allows people to be a part of these ideas with me,” she offers. “It’s more about connecting with people.”