American (1931-)

Edelheit studied at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University in the 1950s. Important teachers included artist Michael Loew and art historian Meyer Schapiro. She established herself in the centre of the downtown avant-garde, becoming a member of the Tenth Street artist-run space, the Reuben Gallery, where her first solo show was held in 1960. She, like other members Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, and Robert Whitman, were pushing at the boundaries and definitions of sculpture, painting, and art-making through Happenings and experimental objects.

In 1962, Edelheit began to explore the subject of tattooing in her work. (This work is dated 1963.) She related to the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss. In his 1955 memoir, Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss speculates that tattooing was the first art, before cave art, and that the human body was the first canvas. The flesh of the figures Edelheit depicts become places where the dreams and fantasies of the models emerge. Edelheit’s paintings of tattooed figures led to her depictions of circus performers, which have a frank sexuality; the contorted bodies and body parts, along with their costumed appearance, suggest sadomasochistic play.

Edelheit’s erotic works on paper, and her series of monumental “Flesh Wall” paintings were exhibited at the Byron Gallery in the mid-1960s. This work prompted Allan Kaprow to write an article for the Village Voice addressing the significance of women’s contemporary erotic art. Edelheit became an essential voice whose work implicitly challenged social expectations of women as well as formalist paradigms and traditional notions of figurative painting and the nude.

Edelheit’s work — across the media of film, painting, and performance — implicitly challenged social expectations of women. By using quotidian materials and referencing tattoo imagery and Non-Western erotica, she also challenged formalist paradigms and traditional notions of figurative painting and the nude. She pushed forms and issues to the surface – literally and figuratively – which our culture preferred to ignore. Edelheit was a pioneer, though the conversation about taboo sexual imagery and the censorship of women artists remains topical today.