Janine Antoni Biography
Bahamian artist (b. Freeport 1964). After studying at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, in 1989 he obtained a master's degree in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; lives and works in New York. His best-known works date back to the 1990s, in which he created a series of studies on gender identity, the cultural perception of female physicality, beauty and sexuality using his own body as a constituent part of the performance . Among his main works of these years: Gnaw (1992, Saatchi gallery, London), focused on the 'social diseases' of bulimia and anorexia, in which A. chiseled two 270 kg cubes with his own teeth, one of chocolate and the other of lard, then obtaining chocolate hearts and lip lipsticks; Loving care (1993, Anthony d'Offay gallery, London) in which she used her hair, kneeling on the ground, to paint the gallery, with a reversal of the female stereotype of care and cleanliness; Slumber (1994, Kunsthaus, Zurich) in which, sleeping inside the museum, he recorded his own brain activity in the REM (Rapid eye movement) phase to then weave a 'blanket of dreams' that reproduced the encephalographic tracing. Among the most recent works, the video Touch (2002) and the unique performance To draw a line (2003, Luhring Augustine, New York), tightrope walking experiments and metaphors on balance, some works on motherhood (e.g. the photographic work One another, 2008, and the installation Inhabit, 2009), and again the installation Tear (2008).
