Room 9
The mystical female levitating can be seen as an image of the experience of women in transitional stages such as adolescence. The most illustrious of these female levitants, Saint Teresa of Avila, is the subject of Marina Abramovic’s homage in her series The Kitchen, a project executed in the kitchens of the La Laboral in Gijón. Abramovic chose this setting to evoke the kitchen of her grandmother, a very religious woman who took her to church every day.
Levitation has a different nuance in Julia Fullerton-Batten’s series of photographs In Between, in which teenage girls appear to float in the air. Here, as in her previous series Teenage Stories, she explored female adolescence as a period of transition in which the body becomes strange and the emotions unstable, without anchorage.
Ferdinand Hodler depicted levitation in The Chosen One, which is among his best-known compositions. The mystical child (the painter made his own son, Hector, pose) kneels at the centre of the scene praying in front of a stunted tree of life while around him, six female angels float a few centimetres above the ground.
Such are his studies of female figures for his compositions: Song in the Distance, Joyous Woman, View into Infinity. Hodler’s female figures move like sleepwalkers. They intone a song to life with the gravity of a liturgy. They seem to reach ecstasy though without pleasure of the flesh. They raise their arms to embrace the whole of nature or to fly out into the cosmos.
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- Autor:
- Marina Abramovic
- Título:
- The Kitchen I. Homage to Saint Therese, 2009
- Fecha:
- Tipo:
- C-print, 220 x 160 cm
- Medidas:
- Úbicacion:
- BESart-Colecção Banco Espírito Santo
- Numero de inventario
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- Autor:
- Julia Fullerton-Batten
- Título:
- Mirror, 2008
- Fecha:
- Tipo:
- C-print, 102 x 137 cm
- Medidas:
- Úbicacion:
- Courtesy of the artist and Cámara Oscura Galería de Arte, Madrid
- Numero de inventario
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- Autor:
- Ferdinand Hodler
- Título:
- Joyous Woman, 1909
- Fecha:
- Tipo:
- Oil on canvas, 126 x 70.5 cm
- Medidas:
- Úbicacion:
- Private Collection, Switzerland
- Numero de inventario