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This article is a part of Overlooked, a collection of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
It was the weekend of the homosexual delight parade in New York City in 1984 when Denise Katz heard her doorbell ring. Surprised, she opened her door and was greeted by Lorenza Böttner, a transgender artist, who was sporting a marriage robe that she had custom-made to suit her armless physique.
“I’m right here for the party!” Böttner stated in her hybrid German-Chilean accent. Though Böttner had buzzed the flawed condominium, Katz invited her in anyway. “From that second on, we didn’t half,” she stated.
That Katz labored in an artwork provide retailer and Böttner was a prolific artist was pure coincidence.
Throughout her lifetime, Böttner created a multidisciplinary physique of labor along with her ft and mouth that included portray, drawing, pictures, dance and efficiency artwork. She made a whole lot of work in Europe and America, dancing in public throughout giant canvases whereas creating impressionistic brushstrokes along with her footprints. In New York, she carried out in entrance of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, and Katz, who would grow to be her roommate, offered her with giant items of paper and different provides.
Though Böttner didn’t obtain mainstream fame in her lifetime, her oeuvre — which criticizes each gender norms and the idea of incapacity — has lately been acknowledged as a big contribution to the art-historical canon, partly for its radical illustration of atypical our bodies.
Böttner’s work has gained additional visibility by a touring exhibition, “Requiem for the Norm,” curated by Paul B. Preciado, a transgender author and thinker.
In her self-portraiture, Böttner celebrated and eroticized her type and depicted herself as a large number of gender-diverse selves. In a photograph collection known as “Face Art,” she used make-up to endure a means of metamorphosis with masks that emphasised and distorted a few of her options.
Böttner additionally transposed her face and physique into stereotypical depictions of girls all through artwork historical past — rendering herself, for instance, as a ballerina or a mom nursing a toddler. In one work, “Venus de Milo,” Böttner’s physique was forged and changed into a sculpture that emulates the well-known Greek statue.
“I wished to point out the fantastic thing about the crippled physique,” she stated in a brief documentary about her life, “Lorenza — Portrait of an Artist” (1991). “I noticed what number of statues have been admired for his or her magnificence and, by an accident, they too had misplaced their arms — however have misplaced nothing of their aesthetic enchantment.”
Lorenza Böttner was born right into a household of German migrants on March 6, 1959, in Punta Arenas, in southern Chile, and was assigned male at beginning. She was a precocious baby who confirmed an early expertise for artwork — and an affinity for birds.
When she was about 9, she climbed a transmission tower in hopes of finding a nest and discovering a child fowl to maintain as a pet. Startled by a mom fowl who instantly opened her wings, Lorenza misplaced her stability and grabbed the reside electrical cables hanging round her to keep away from falling. Her arms have been each severely burned as much as the elbows and finally amputated on the shoulders.
In 1969, she relocated to Germany along with her mom, Irene Böttner, who held varied jobs, together with working in a bakery and cleansing homes. Lorenza was handled on the Heidelberg Rehabilitation Center and educated on the Lichtenau Orthopedic Rehabilitation Clinic, Preciado stated. She struggled by her restoration and, to the dismay of her medical doctors, rejected using prosthetic arms.
“As a teen, Lorenza was depressed and apathetic and tried possibly greater than as soon as to commit suicide,” Katz stated in an interview. “It was her mom, Irene, who put the pen in Lorenza’s mouth, and put the desire to reside by artwork into Lorenza.”
From 1978 to 1984, Böttner studied artwork on the Gesamthochschule Kassel, the place self-portraiture grew to become a cornerstone of her creative observe. Her curiosity in efficiency was nurtured throughout her research, and he or she developed a hybrid type of expression that she known as “danced portray” (“tanz malerei” in German) or “pantomime portray” (“pantomime malerei”).
After graduating in 1984, Böttner moved to New York City to check dance and efficiency at New York University with a grant from the Disabled Artists Network. She frequented nightclubs and roller-skating rinks and was a beloved determine among the many metropolis’s queer artists.
“This is somebody who had the telephone variety of William Burroughs and Andy Warhol,” Preciado stated.
Böttner additionally posed as a mannequin for the photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, however she felt their pictures exploited her incapacity. This dehumanizing gaze is precisely what Böttner sought to invert and deconstruct in her self-portraiture, which celebrates her magnificence and humanity.
“If medical discourse and modes of illustration goal to desexualize and degender the impaired physique, Lorenza’s efficiency work eroticized the trans-armless physique, endowing it with sexual and political efficiency,” Preciado wrote in an exhibition textual content for the Documenta artwork honest in 2017, the place she first confirmed her work.
The curator Stamatina Gregory, who introduced “Requiem for the Norm” to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Manhattan in 2022, stated the outpouring of assist from Böttner’s previous associates, lovers, colleagues and acquaintances was overwhelming. “I didn’t notice how vital internet hosting this present could be in broadening the analysis on Lorenza’s life and work,” Gregory stated in an interview. “The interval of her life that she spent in New York City was extremely formative” in her studio experimentation and neighborhood constructing.
She even, Katz stated, “loosened up as an artist, and started to make use of extra colour.”
In 1985, Böttner discovered that she was H.I.V. constructive. The bodily derailment that got here with the sickness made touring and dealing tougher towards the top of her life, which she spent largely in Germany and Spain.
She died of AIDS-related problems on Jan. 13, 1994, in Munich. She was 34.
Preciado was launched to Böttner’s work in 2008 whereas conducting analysis on the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona, the place Böttner served because the inspiration and have become the bodily embodiment of its armless mascot, often called Petra. Though he was desperate to be taught extra about Böttner, he struggled to seek out any info past the place she had acquired her schooling.
In 2015, when Preciado was named a curator of Documenta 14, which takes place in Kassel — the place Böttner had studied artwork — it felt like divine intervention. “I’m not a spiritual individual and I don’t have any paranormal beliefs,” he stated, “however one thing within me instructed me that I’ve to seek out Lorenza.”
Preciado tracked down Böttner’s mom and shortly appeared on her doorstep. “Irene requested why I used to be looking for Lorenza,” he stated. “I stated, ‘Well, I’m like Lorenza, I’m trans.’ We hugged one another and he or she stated, ‘I’ve been ready for you for 20 years.’”
Her mom shared a whole lot of Böttner’s artworks with him, in addition to many private results that she had saved.
“I at all times believed in Lorenza’s artwork, and I knew that it was going to grow to be widespread,” Irene Böttner stated in a telephone interview. “I nonetheless imagine it’s going to acquire extra recognition.”
Preciado, who debuted “Requiem for the Norm” at La Virreina Center for the Image in Barcelona in 2018, stated he discovered Böttner’s work to be “filled with hope, transformation and emancipation.”
“It’s not work about trans or disabled individuals being victims of the system,” he stated. “It’s a piece of monumental political efficiency that must be seen and given to the brand new generations.”
