#LynnHershmanLeeson in Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s, on view at Museum Brandhorst, Munich through January 15, 2023 Photo: Elisabeth Greil works: X-Ray Woman, 1966 Acrylic, pencil, and colored pencil on canvas 93 × 48.7 cm X-Ray Man, 1970 Acrylic, pencil, Letraset, and acrylic glass on wood 105.5 × 75 cm Excerpted from #FranziskaLinhardt's essay "Hybrid Figurations: Sculptural Narratives on the State of Bodies" ... #LynnHershmanLeeson’s works from the 1960s and 1970s recall the early interest in machines in the guise of human beings: in X-Ray Woman (1966) the delicately drawn hybrid figure had gears instead of hips and partial organs in the form of complex dials. Three curled-up infants cavort in her stomach, while multiple miniature Vitruvian men are visible on her organs and mechanisms. The title—a reference to the noninvasive imaging techniques that improved so radicallyin the 1960s—connects this work with another collage by Hershman Leeson, namely a smoking X-Ray Man (1970) with an appliquéd plastic prosthesis, a visor, and a spray-painted negative image of a heart; this image was made not long after the first heart transplant in the United States was attempted (but soon failed).... ....#KikiKogelnik and Hershman Leeson not only looked under the surfaces of bodies, they also looked at them as projection surfaces. In their early collages bodies arise from combinations of corporeal-technoid elements, diagrams, and vectors—but above all from a differentiated game with binary attributions. In their cyborg reinventions they toyed critically with the abolition of human sovereignty and the ‘completion’ of ‘inadequate’ bodies (mostly female) by machines and associated biopolitics and processes of rationalization.