Heide Hatry

STATEMENT
In all my projects the material itself is the reality to which I want to draw attention and through which I wish to stimulate thought about who we are, what we have done, and what is at stake in our passage through the world.

I’m interested in how the material of the work creates a space in which certain reflections are inevitable, in which the normally invisible becomes not only visible but insistent, how knowledge affects our understanding of beauty, and how the dynamic of appearance and reality, or semblance and truth, can be invoked in ostensibly simple images.

More and more I’ve become skeptical of the grand scale in art, as it so readily submits itself to spectacle, misdirection, commodification, or deceit, in which the crucial one-to-one component of the art relationship is obliterated before it ever has a chance to emerge.
 
In my artist’s books, I thematize secret worlds, the intimacy of time, the silence of impending doom, the small truths that inhabit large things and the great truths that inhabit small things, the modesty of hope, or conversely, of resignation, in the face of death, the melancholic nobility of resistance, the poignant resolve of the individual against the intransigence, banality, and cold calculation of discovery.

BIOGRAPHY
New York-based German artist Heide Hatry, grew up on a pig farm, studied sports, art practice, and art history, and taught at a private artist’s school, while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller.

She is best known for her body related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs or other discarded, disdained, or taboo materials.

Hatry has curated numerous exhibitions and has shown her work at museums and galleries all over the world, including Mona (Museum for New and Old Art), Tasmania; Reina Sophia, and Fundación Alianza Hispanica, Madrid, Spain; Museum Moyland, Bedburg Hau, and Klingspor Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; Under Heaven Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing, China; and Cultural Institute, Santiago, Chile.

Hatry is represented by Ubu Gallery in NYC, where many events in conjunction with her exhibitions took place at the New Museum, MOMA PS1, CAA Conference, Deutsches Haus (NYU), Drawing Center; and many others.

She is the founder and president of Icons in Ash, a social art project devoted to helping people contend with loss, as well as of Polar Bear Fest, a Lumbung art initiative created to foster community while fighting the climate crisis.

Hatry’s work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, The Huffington Post, Musée Magazine, Arte Al Límite, Boston Globe, Fox News, NY1, New York Post, Pennsound and other media.

She has collaborated with hundreds of figures in the art and cultural world, including Hans Belting, Bazon Brock, Mark Dery, Jessica Hagedorn, Donna Haraway, Siri Hustvedt, Jonas Mekas, Kate Millett, Steven Pinker, Avital Ronell, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Singer, Aldo Tambellini, Klaus Theweleit, Luisa Valenzuela, and Peter Weibel.

She has produced more than 200 artist’s books, edited dozens of art catalogues, and four of her larger projects, were documented in monographic books.