Femmy Otten
∗1981, Amsterdam, Netherlands
lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Femmy Otten’s research celebrates the human body in all its parts, and is characterised by absolute freedom. The artist shifts naturally between woodworking, pencil drawings, tempera, paintings and performance, intertwining references to works from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.Otten thus grafts into an ancient tradition, but chooses to portray bodies excluded from the art of the past, thus filling in the gaps of history. The result is timeless works that address universal themes such as love, fluidity between genders and motherhood, but which may also be viewed a series of self-portraits. “My intimacy is my activism; shame is a lack of empathy with oneself,” says the artist in the verses she composed forThe Parliament of Marmots. At Castel Gardena, Otten presents a new series of works:The Mountains and the Vulva, in which the artist adopts universal symbols of fertility such as the vulva, recurring in variouscultures and eras, which is at the same time an intimate representation, strongly connected to her life: “I want to bring together traditions with transgression, the future, perception and stories without a beginning or end.”Hourglass is a wooden work based on an earlier work,Days Undressed, which doubled, creates the shape of an hourglass. In the work, the passage of time is represented through parts of the human body: wrinkles, folds and body parts marred by love are featured on the surface of the sculpture, constituting an hourglass.
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