Heide Hatry

Heide Hatry (born 1965) is a New York City and Berlin based German neo-conceptual artist, curator and editor. Her work, often either body-related or employing animal flesh and organs (cf: bio-art), has aroused controversy and has been considered horrific, repulsive or sensationalist by some critics, while others have hailed her as an "imaginative provocateur," "a force of nature..., an artist and a humanist who is making a selfless contribution to life," and an artist whose works provoke a "reaction akin to having witnessed a murder." Her work bears conceptual (and material) similarities to that of Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, Dieter Roth, Jana Sterbak, and Louise Bourgeois.

Hatry grew up on a farm in the outskirts of Holzgerlingen. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. Later she studied painting, printing, typography, photography, and sculpture at various art schools including Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and Pädagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg, as well as art history at the University of Heidelberg. After many years teaching painting while working in the antiquarian book trade in Heidelberg, she began her career as a visual artist in 2003 in New York.

Her first solo show took place at Volume Gallery in Chelsea in October, 2004 and consisted of a diverse group of paintings, objects and unique books, with an emphasis on new work that would eventually become part of her book project entitled SKIN. In addition to being the documentation of several years of work with a highly eccentric art material, SKIN is a complex and thoroughly-conceived conceptual project in which Hatry plays on the fact that skin is the medium through which individual identity is most commonly received. The seven female artists all working with skin as a medium are in fact seven facets of Hatry herself. In the book, she fragments her own biography and accordingly distributes aspects of the work among seven individuals. Hatry prevailed upon nine art historians, critics, curators and thinkers (Susanna Partsch, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Renée Vara, Michael Amy, Elsbeth Sachs, Cornelia Koch, Christoph Zuschlag, Veronica Mundi and Hans Gercke) to participate in the project, maintaining the conceit and treating each of their subjects as unique, living, artists. Hatry created an artist portrait for each of her individual "selves" using prosthetics and make-up, in a manner akin to the work of Cindy Sherman.

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