Cathy Josefowitz — Release

In her quest to represent the body as an expressive vehicle of individual experience, New York-born, Swiss-raised artist Cathy Josefowitz (1956 – 2014) created a wide-ranging oeuvre spanning drawing and painting, performance and dance. The breadth of her creative output will be on view in a solo exhibition—Josefowitz’s first in Zurich—focusing on her compelling progression of the figure across four decades, from the 1970s to her later shift towards abstraction, with many works shown for the first time. The presentation takes its title from Josefowitz’s choreographic piece ‘Release’ (1988), a performance replete with fluid movements projected on the wall of the gallery. The artist takes the feeling of liberation to a whole new meaning, finding freedom in her dance and in her paintings.

On view are Josefowitz’s oils on cardboard and gouaches on paper from the 1970s in which the artist plays with traditional depictions of the reclining nude through a female lens. Later paintings on canvas and watercolors on receipts from the early 1990s reveal a new way of working with the figure through a shift in pattern, style, color and form. The figurative realm soon gave way to increasing abstraction, releasing the body from literal depictions. Josefowitz’s Prayers series (1998 – 2001) depicts prayer shawls and mats that often came to represent family members, whilst the Venus series (2004 – 2006) places the motif of the cloth in dialogue with tropes of womanhood from art history. In surveying the development of Josefowitz’s visual language, this exhibition attests to the artist’s enduring determination to depict the figure in both its anatomical and metaphysical dimensions.