?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
LORENZA BÖTTNER (1959-1994)
Untitled (Self Portrait). Pencil on cream wove paper. 330x234 mm; 13x9⅓ inches. Signed and dated "12-9-86" in pencil, lower right recto. 1986.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Lorenza Böttner was a multi-media artist that focused on transformation, evolveing her painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public space a stage for a politicized bodily difference. Originally named Ernst Lorenz Böttner, was born into a family of German origin in Punta Arenas, Chile. At the age of eight, he was electrocuted when climbing up a pylon, resulting in both arms having to be amputated below the shoulder. He returned to Germany with his mother in 1973 to undertake a series of plastic surgery operations and moved to Lichtenau, a city near Kassel. Böttner grew up being considered "disabled" and suffered the same internment and exclusion as the so-called Contergan children, who were born with morphological differences from in-uterus effects of the drug thalidomide.
Böttner, however, resisted and refused prosthetic arms. S/he chose to transform her situation, developing an impassioned interest for classical ballet, jazz, and tap dancing, and learning to paint with her feet and mouth. S/he studied painting at the Kassel School of Art and Design, graduating with a thesis entitled "Behindert?" in which s/he questioned the category of disability and explored the genealogy of mouth-and-foot painters. In Kassel Lorenz decided to use the name Lorenza, affirming an openly transgender feminine position.
She actively opposed the processes of desubjectification, incapacitation, desexualization, and castration that modern normalizing societies reserve for the bodily other. In 1988, Lorenza moved to Barcelona and in 1994 passed from HIV/AIDS related complications.
