This article is part of: overlookedA series of obituaries, beginning in 1851, of notable people whose deaths were not reported in The Times.
On the weekend of the 1984 Gay Pride Parade in New York City, Dennis Katz heard his doorbell ringing. Surprised, she opened the door and was greeted by her transgender artist, Lorenza Böttner. She was wearing a wedding dress custom-made to fit her armless body.
“I’m here for the party!” Böttner spoke with a mixed German-Chilean accent. Although Böttner called her at the wrong apartment, Katz invited her anyway. “From that moment on, we were inseparable,” she said.
It was purely a coincidence that Katz worked in an art supply store and Böttner was a prolific artist.
Throughout his life, Böttner created a comprehensive body of work with his feet and mouth that included painting, drawing, photography, dance, and performance art. She painted hundreds of paintings in Europe and the United States, and danced in public on large canvases, creating her impressive brushstrokes with her own footprints. In New York she worked at St. Petersburg on the Bowery. She performed in front of St. Mark’s Church, and Katz, who would become her roommate, provided her with large sheets of paper and other items.
Although Böttner did not achieve mainstream fame during her lifetime, her work, which critiques both gender norms and concepts of disability, has in recent years been recognized as an important contribution to the art historical canon for its radical representation of the non-stereotypical. dead body.
Böttner’s work received further attention through “Requiem for the Norm,” a traveling exhibition curated by transgender writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado.
In her self-portraits, Böttner celebrated and eroticized her own appearance, depicting herself as a gender-diverse self. In her photo series titled ‘Her Face Art’, she went through the process of transforming herself into a mask that emphasized and distorted some of her own features through her makeup.
Böttner also altered her face and body into typical depictions of women throughout art history. For example, she presented herself as a ballerina or a mother nursing her child. In one of her works, “Venus de Milo,” Böttner’s body was cast and turned into a sculpture that mimicked famous Greek statues.
“I wanted to show the beauty of the crippled body,” she said in ‘Lorenza – Portrait of the Artist’ (1991), a short documentary about her life. “I saw how many statues were admired for their beauty, and although they too lost an arm in an accident, they lost none of their aesthetic appeal.”
Lorenza Böttner was born male at birth on March 6, 1959, to German immigrants in Punta Arenas, southern Chile. She was a precocious child who showed a talent for art from her early age and an affinity for birds.
When she was about 9 years old, she climbed a power tower to find nests and baby birds to keep as pets. Surprised by the mother bird, who suddenly spread her wings, Lorenza lost her balance and grabbed onto the electric cables hanging around her to avoid falling. Her arms were badly burned up to her elbows and eventually she was amputated at the shoulders.
In 1969 she moved to Germany with her mother Irene Böttner. She had a variety of jobs, including working in a bakery and cleaning houses. Lorenza received treatment at the Heidelberg Rehabilitation Center and received training at the Lichtenau Orthopedic Rehabilitation Clinic, Preciado said. She had a difficult recovery and doctors disappointingly refused to use her prosthetics.
“As a teenager, Lorenza was depressed and apathetic and attempted suicide more than once,” Katz said in an interview. She said, “It was her mother Irene who put the pen in Lorenza’s mouth and inspired Lorenza with the will to live through her art.”
From 1978 to 1984, Böttner studied art at the Gesamthochschule Kassel, where self-portraits became the cornerstone of her artistic practice. Her interest in performance developed during her studies and she developed a mixed form of expression that she called “dancing painting” (“tanz Malerei” in German) or “pantomime painting” (“pantomime Malerei”).
After graduating in 1984, Böttner moved to New York to study dance and performance at New York University with a grant from the Disabled Artists Network. She frequented nightclubs and roller skating rinks and was a beloved figure among the city’s queer artists.
“This is a guy who had the phone numbers of William Burroughs and Andy Warhol,” Preciado said.
Böttner also worked as a model for photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, but felt that their images exploited her disability. This inhuman gaze is exactly what Böttner sought to reverse and deconstruct in his self-portraits that celebrate his beauty and humanity.
In the exhibition text at the Documenta Art Fair in 2017, Preciado said, “If medical discourse and representational methods aim to desexualize and desexualize the damaged body, Lorenza’s performance work eroticizes the armless body and unlocks its sexual and political potential.” “I grant,” he wrote. Where she showed her work for the first time.
At the Leslie-Roman Museum of Art in Manhattan in 2022. <표준을 위한 레퀴엠>Stamatina Gregory, the curator who brought the exhibition, said the outpouring of support from Böttner’s past friends, lovers, colleagues and acquaintances was overwhelming. “I had no idea how important hosting this show would be for broadening research on Lorenza’s life and work,” Gregory said in an interview. She said, “The period of her life she spent in New York City was incredibly formative in her studio experiments and community building.”
Katz even said that she “relaxed as an artist and started using more color.”
In 1985, Böttner learned that he was HIV positive. The physical derailments of her illness made her travel and work more difficult in the last years of her life, which she spent mainly in Germany and Spain.
She died of AIDS-related complications in Munich on January 13, 1994. She was 34 years old.
Preciado came across Böttner’s work in 2008 while conducting research on the Barcelona 1992 Paralympic Games, where Böttner was inspired to become the physical embodiment of the armless mascot known as Petra. He wanted to know more about Böttner, but struggled to find information about her outside of where she had received her education.
In 2015, when Preciado was appointed curator of Documenta 14 in Kassel, where Böttner studied art, it felt like divine intervention. “I’m not a religious person and I don’t have any supernatural beliefs,” he said. “But something inside me told me I had to find Lorenza.”
Preciado tracked down Böttner’s mother and soon showed up on her doorstep. “Irene asked me why I was looking for Lorenza,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, I’m like Lorenza and I’m transgender.’ We hugged each other and she said, ‘I’ve waited 20 years for you.’”
Her mother shared with him hundreds of Böttner’s works and many of her personal belongings that she had saved.
“I always believed in Lorenza’s art and knew it would be popular,” Irene Böttner said in a phone interview. She said, “I believe it will still become more popular.”
Preciado, who presented ‘Requiem for Norms’ at Barcelona’s La Virreina Image Center in 2018, said Bötner’s work was ‘full of hope, change and liberation.’
“The problem is not that transgender people or people with disabilities are victims of the system,” he said. “This is a work with enormous political potential that needs to be shown and passed on to new generations.”
