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Orshi Drozdik: Individual Mythology, From Conceptual to PostmodernSeptember 15th at 7 p.m.John C. Welchman, professor of art history in the visual Arts department at the University of California presents Orshi Drozdik latest book |  |
John C. Welchman’s lecture, titled Orshi Drozdik: Passion After Appropriation, traces the development of Drozdik's career as an artist from the mid-1970s to today, examining her work in drawing and painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Beginning with her reaction against the traditions of academic and Socialist realism in which she was schooled in Budapest, Drozdik emerged in the later 1970s as one of the first women artists from Eastern Europe to embark on a practice in which photography, performance, and the body converge in a reexamination of social and sexual identities.   Following her move to Amsterdam in 1978 and then to Canada and New York city, Drozdik made a signal contribution to a roster of issues associated with the development of the critical postmodernism of the New York art world of the 80s and 90s. Her longstanding interest in the construction and performance of gender continued with the Adventure in Technos Dystopium project (begun in 1984), especially in the allegorical figure of the Medical Venus, where it found a new site in dialogue with the histories and mythologies of science; while work from the later 1990s established an intriguing dialogue with the fashion and beauty industries by attending to the ritual power of cosmetics. John C. Welchman, Orshi Drozdik: Passion After Appropriation |
