Heide Hatry

Born in 1965 in Sindelfingen (Germany)
Lives and works in New York (USA)

Heide Hatry grew up on a farm in the south of Germany. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school, studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg and taught at a private art school for 15 years while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Germany and Spain and has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world, including Mona (Museum for New and Old Art), Tasmania. Australia; Reina Sophia and Fundación Alianza Hispanica, Madrid, Spain; Museum Moyland, Bedburg Hau, and Klingspor Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; Under Heaven Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing, China; and Cultural Institute, Santiago, Chile. Events in conjunction with her exhibitions took place at the New Museum, MOMA PS1, CAA Conference, Deutsches Haus/New York University, Drawing Center, in NYC; and many others. She is represented by Ubu Gallery in New Yorl.

The portraits from Heide Hatry’s series Heads and Tales on view at KB17 are photographic documentations of sculptures addressing issues of violence, death and gender identity. The artist is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs. She is often described as a neo-conceptualist and, to the extent that the "space" in which her work operates transcends, transgresses, or transforms the normal relationship of artist to both audience and work, this is accurate – her work does not reside in the pictorial plane, the sculptural space, or filmic time. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles (and specifically what it means to be a woman), the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst. She refers to her large-scale, usually broadly collaborative, projects, which always involve multiple layers of perception, as Gesamtkunstwerke: she creates the art work, displays it, often in unorthodox ways, composes books and organizes events in which different aspects of performances or texts bring new perspectives to the work.