Orshi Drozdik
Orshi Drozdik with the installation Brains on High Heels, 1993. Photo, 2006
Born	Orsolya Drozdik (1946-05-08)May 8, 1946 Abda, Hungary
Nationality	Hungarian
Alma mater	Hungarian University of Fine Arts
Known for	Conceptual Art, Feminist Art, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Feminist Art, Feminist Art from the 70s, Feminist Conceptual Artists
Style	Feminist art[1]
Website	orshidrozdik.comorshi.hu

Orshi Drozdik (born 1946 in Hungary) is a feminist visual artist based in New York City. Her work includes drawings, paintings, photographs,^[2]: 12 etchings, performances, videos, sculptures, academic writings, fiction, and art installations, among others She explores themes that undermine traditional and erotic representation of women.^[1][a] She has been influenced by Valéria Dienes, János Zsilka, Susan Sontag, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Luce Irigaray, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, among others.^{[3]: 54 [b]}

Biography

Early life

Drozdik grew up in Abda and Győr in Hungary. Her mother with her family were living in Pozsony (today Bratislava) in 1945, and were stripped of their citizenship and property by the Beneš decrees without compensation and forced to move. The governmental party labeled her father, as most of middle class intellectuals, class enemy and his property was confiscated. In 1956, after her father's death, she decided to be an artist. With the support of her mother (who alone raised Orshi, a sister Ildikó and a brother Béla) she started to learn formal drawing and painting in an evening drawing study group. Drozdik studied art at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest.^[1]

1970–77

Starting in the 1970s she focused on the patriarchal representation of the female body; she performed and made art in Budapest at the same time as Marina Abramovic in Belgrade.^[2]

From 1975, she created a critical, feminist methodology to investigate patriarchal representation.^[1] Under her birth name, Drozdik Orsolya, as a student of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts,^[2] she researched and examined 19th and early 20th century academic documents of the female nude-model-settings in the archive of the academy’s library.^[2] She photographed and appropriated these photo-images for her concept ImageBank: a semiotic study of patriarchal art history, education; an image analysis that she exhibited of the appropriated images as her own work.

In the mid seventies, turning against the patriarchal educational and political systems, she found her own voice.^[4] From 1975 she exhibited in Budapest and internationally in socialist countries, and worked in association with "Rozsa" (Roses), a young artists' post-conceptual group (1976–78). In 1978 married Andreas De Jong, left Hungary, lived in Amsterdam, 1979 divorced and moved to Vancouver, Toronto, 1980 to New York. She lived in Vancouver, Toronto and New York City between 1979-1991 with the novelist Patrick McGrath.^[5]

1980-1999

In the early 1980s Drozdik worked in association with the artist group Colab. She exhibited at the Tom Cugliani Gallery (1988-1893),^[6] the Richard Anderson Gallery (1990-95), and the New Museum,^[c][7] 1989, 1991, and at the 9th Biennale of Sydney in 1992.^[8]

In late 90s she exhibited in Hungarian and Central European institutions including the Ernst Museum in Budapest, the Adventure in Technos Dystopium (1990), 3 by 3 from Hungary (1996) at the Center for Curatorial Studies, New York.^[9] and The New Arrivals: 8 Contemporary Artists from Hungary, (2011) and at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.^[3][10], among others. Her photographic installations of the late 1980s and 1900s are a production of a new Body Space, a project that reflects the video installation of Tony Oursler. In 1983 she produced through the legacy of Andreas Vesalius the drawing series, Dissection of Artaud, Foucalt and Vesalius (1983-84), Drozdik's statement on the link between the dissectional probings of the body and her gender concerns.^[3]

2000

In the years of 2000 had major retrospective exhibitions showing different aspects of her work: Adventure and Appropriation 1975-2001 were exhibited at the Ludwig Museum Budapest - Museum of Contemporary Art, ^[3][11] Ludwig Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest 2001-02,^[12] Passion After Appropriation in Museum of Contemporary Art [9], and in The Art Pavilion in Zagreb, Croatia, 2002, Individual Mythology - Medical Venus - Young and Beautiful, Municipal Museum of Art, Győr, 2003, The Other Venus, MODEM 2011, [10], Contemporary Art Center [11]. Debrecen, Hungary. In 2006 Drozdik published a book titled Individuális Mitológia, konceptuálistól a postmodernig, (Individual Mythology From Conceptual to Postmodern Gondolat Publishing IBNS 9639567795) a summary of her thoughts, methodology and work process, focusing on her starting point the 1970s conceptual movements in Hungary.^[1]

Chronology of works

• 1975-76 The line Etching style animation
• 1975-77 Nude Model I, II, III Series of photos and performances
• 1975-76 Situation Series of photos
• 1975-77 Individual Mythology I, II, III. Series of performances, photos and photo offsets
• 1976-77 Individual Mythology Out of Cage. Performance and photos, offset^[3]
• 1977 Blink and Sigh I, II, III. Series of performances and photos
• 1976-77 Common symbols Series of photos and photo offsets
• 1978-79 Pornography I, II, III Series of performances, photos, xeroxes
• 1979 On My Beauty ^[2]: 40
• 1980 Try to Be Transparent Performance, photos
• 1978-80 In Some One Shadows I, II Series of photos, xeroxes, drawings, installations
• 1980 Diverting the Diagonal I, II Series of performances, photos, xeroxes
• 1982 Art History and Me ^{[2]: 13 : 150 : 160}
• 1983-85 Biological Metaphors ^[2]: 13
• 1984 Biological Metaphors At the Budapest Galeria. ^{[13]: 58–63}
• 1984 Adventure in Tecnos Dystopium ^[2]: 14
• 1986 The Life of Edith Simpson, Epitome on the Enlightement, National Genius of Art and Science. Orshi Drozdik, New York.^{[14]: 5  [2]: 72–75}
• 1986 The Hierarchy of Organs ^{[2]: 64 [d]}
• 1987 Love Letter to the Leyden Jar ^{[2]: 76–77 [e]}

Work

Drozdik in her work exposes social issues that are embedded within a cultural system,^[4] thus countering a range of representations in regards facts and scientific truths within the discourses of art, medical, and scientific history.^[15] Starting in the 1970s and using her own body Drozdik made performances and feminist performance art^[2]. In earlier works, in order to investigate patriarchal representation, she specified a female point of view; from 1975 she created a critical feminist methodology.^[4] As a student of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, she researched the 19th and early 20th-century documents portraying the female nude-model, appropriating these patriarchal images for her ImageBank. Drozdik, in the mid 1970s used semiotics methodology, to create a critical analysis of the academic training exhibiting female nude model settings in art-practice, art history and later in the pornographic representations.^[4] This was the starting point of her "feminist conceptual art", later she amended her methods as critical deconstruction of meaning, and theories of representation to encompass various fields, mediums, and concepts.^[6]

Performance

Her works, Individual Mythology (1975–77) and Nude model (1977), comprising performance, photography, offset prints and drawings, were exhibited in Budapest.^[2] In this series of work she started to deconstruct the representations of female body based on her original concept named Image Bank, in Hungarian Képban elmélet (1975), in which she defined her methodology using existing representations to unfold and reinterpret meaning. Inspired by Valéria Dienes, the philosopher and dancer, she was able to link her female point of view to the early feminist movement, that was powerful in Hungary before WWII. A harbinger in the Eastern Bloc, Drozdik focused on the methodology of representation - using the early 20 century “Free Dancer” movements in Hungary as a starting point - to construct a discourse of feminist art.^[1] The Pornography (1978) series was completed in Amsterdam, I Try To Be Transparent (1980)^[16], performance and the Double (1980) in Toronto and Genius (1989) [12] in New Museum, New York[13]

Installation series

Adventure in Technos Dystopium^[14] (1984–1993) deconstructed scientific representations of truth.^[17] For this series Drozdik created a fictional 18th century female scientist, Edith Simpson. Some of the themes she explored were the romanticizing of disease and the taxonomic formalism of Carl Linnaeus.

From 1989 Drozdik used models of her father's brain as part of a sculptural installations.^[3]

In 1988, 1989, and 1990, she exbited at the Tom Cugliani Gallery.^{[18] [f]} Drozdik continued to produce and exhibit feminist work, and deconstructing the patriarchal, scientific gaze, including, in 1986, inventing the 18th Century pseudo-persona of Edith Simpson,^{[14]: 5 [g]}(1983-88); a woman scientist complete with her own heritage.^{[4][2]: 72–75} Her installation series entitled Manufacturing the Self (1993–97) is a deconstruction of medical representations of the female body.^{[2]: 114 : 156} Drozdik's 1993-04 exhibition Medical Erotic, part of the Manufacturing the Self series,^[3] featured a cast of the Drozdik's body alongside photographs of a medical wax-work figure and a fictional journal.^[19][6] The installation Manufacturing The Self, Brains on High Heels (1992), a rubber cast of a brain inserted into a pair of high heels.^{[2]: 110–111} Exhibited first in Sydney Biennial in 1992-93.^[4]

Conceptual painting series

Art history and Me (1982) she created a new series of paintings titled Lipstick Paintings ala Fontana (2002–06) in which the surface of canvases are punctured with lipstick. The series of digital prints Venuses, Drapery and Bodyfolds (2000–2007)^{[20] [21]} featured fragments of draperies and naked women from the history of art. A series of exhibitions titled All Over Now Baby Blue were exhibited from 2013–15, Stripes Ala Sol Levitt in 2015.^[1]

Awards and membership

• 1976 Kondor Béla Award of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary
• 1977 Stipend of the Young Artist’s Studio, Budapest, Hungary
• 1985 Prince Bernhard Foundation fellowship, ^[22] Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 1990 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA
• 1990 The Gordon Matta-Clark Trust fellowship, New York, USA^[h]
• 1991 Cartier Foundation Fellowship, ^[23] Paris, France
• 1993 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, New York, USA
• 1993–95 CAVA, Career Advancement of Visual Artists fellowship, Miami, FL, USA
• 1994 Austrian Ministry of Culture fellowship, Vienna, Austria
• 1995 New York Foundation for the Arts, Women Photographers Catalog Project, New York, USA
• 2001 The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation scholarship, New York, USA
• 2003/04 Landis & Gyr Foundation grant, Zug, Switzerland
• 2003 Munkácsy Mihály State Art Award, hu:Munkácsy-díj Munkacsy Mihaly Hungary
• 2015 Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts^[24]
• Drozdik is member of SZIMA^[25]