BIOGRAPHY

Martha Edelheit was born New York City in 1931, where she lived and worked until moving to Sweden in 1993, where she currently lives just outside of Stockholm. She is known as a pioneering feminist artist whose work of the 1960s addresses female desire, the body, and skin as a double “canvas” for tattoo imagery.

Edelheit studied at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University in the 1950s. Important teachers included artist Michael Loew and art historian Meyer Schapiro. She established herself in the centre of the downtown avant-garde, becoming a member of the Tenth Street artist-run space, the Reuben Gallery, where her first solo show was held in 1960. She, like other members Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, and Robert Whitman, were pushing at the boundaries and definitions of sculpture, painting, and art-making through Happenings and experimental objects. Edelheit exhibited her “extension” paintings which break the frame of the work and utilise utilitarian objects. Her second solo show, in 1961, was held at another significant nucleus of experimental art, the Judson Gallery.

Pictured: Edelheit in her NY studio during the making of J x 2, 1971. Copyright the artist

“One of Edelheit’s talents is to offer a portrait of a personality through the body. She removes the female from the abstract realm of current female flesh fashions to show us familiar bodies. What Edelheit, who is acutely attuned to her models, was doing in the act of her painting was letting the woman’s life define her —her existence was her essence.”

Maryse Holder

By 1962, Edelheit began to explore the subject of tattooing in her work. She related to the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss. In his 1955 memoir, Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss speculates that tattooing was the first art, before cave art, and that the human body was the first canvas. The flesh of the figures Edelheit depicts become places where the dreams and fantasies of the models emerge. Edelheit’s paintings of tattooed figures led to her depictions of circus performers, which have a frank sexuality; the contorted bodies and body parts, along with their costumed appearance, suggest sadomasochistic play.

Edelheit’s erotic works on paper, and her series of monumental “Flesh Wall” paintings were exhibited at the Byron Gallery in the mid-1960s. This work prompted Allan Kaprow to write an article for the Village Voice addressing the significance of women’s contemporary erotic art. Edelheit became an essential voice whose work implicitly challenged social expectations of women as well as formalist paradigms and traditional notions of figurative painting and the nude. In the 1970s, Edelheit made experimental films and was a part of the group Women/Artist/Filmmakers along with Maria Lassnig and Carolee Schneemann.

Pictured: Edelheit NY studio shots during the making of Jx2, 1971 and Seals, Central Park Zoo, 1970-71. Copyright the artist

Edelheit’s work — across the media of film, painting, and performance — implicitly challenged social expectations of women. By using quotidian materials and referencing tattoo imagery and Non-Western erotica, she also challenged formalist paradigms and traditional notions of figurative painting and the nude. She pushed forms and issues to the surface – literally and figuratively – which our culture preferred to ignore. Edelheit was a pioneer, though the conversation about taboo sexual imagery and the censorship of women artists remains topical today.

Since 1961, Edelheit has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 11 from the Reuben at the Guggenheim Museum, Three Centuries of the American Nude at the New York Cultural Centre, BLAM! at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City at the Grey Gallery of New York University. Edelheit's work was recently the focus of the critically acclaimed exhibition Martha Edelheit Flesh Walls: Tales from the 60's at Eric Firestone Gallery, New York. Her work is featured in numerous private and institutional collections including New York Public Library, USA, Piteå Commune, Sweden, Rowan University Art Gallery, USA and Minneapolis Institute of Art, USA.

THE NAKED TRUTH: WORKS FROM THE 60’S & 70’S

A BODY APART (GROUP EXHIBITION), 2021