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The spectacular landscapes of the Engadin valley in Switzerland have long been artistically dominated by men — Alberto Giacometti was born here; Giovanni Segatini died on the mountain while completing a triptych en plein air. More recently, Gerhard Richter photographed and painted the valley’s jaw-dropping contours and peaks (as visitors to nearby St Moritz and Sils can see until April).
Muzeum Susch claims a stake amid these epic surroundings for neglected, avant-garde women artists. Founded by wealthy Polish collector Grażyna Kulczyk, the private institution took three years to renovate the medieval monastery — on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela — before opening in 2019 with the museum’s collection and temporary exhibitions. Pilgrims still stop by, as well as skiers and hikers, bolstering Susch’s tiny permanent population.
Those who do make the journey here for art (or otherwise) anticipate discoveries. They will be rewarded by Muzeum Susch’s new show of austere and audacious sculptures by Estonian artist Anu Põder (1947-2013), Space for My Body, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
The entry to the exhibition is a large platform, a stage for a group of Põder’s early works from the 1970s and 1980s. Puncturing the space with their eerie, cyborgian forms, the assemblages, a clunky mix of industrial and organic materials (plastic, epoxy, wood, rope and textile), bear some resemblance to human bodies — you can make out truncated torsos, buttocks, fabricated hands and limbs. But they also seem to writhe and wrestle with their own forms and take on a life of their own.
Unlike other sculptors working under the Soviet regime in Estonia, Põder was against making realistic portraits of leaders and shunned readily available bronze and plaster. Instead, she sought out unconventional materials “that were not off the shelf, let’s say”, as Alemani puts it. The distinctive hard pink plastic that recurs across several works of this period was used for orthopaedics, obtained from her medic brother, and warmed up in the bathtub at home to be reborn as cartoonish, mutant figures such as “With a Trumpet from Lasnamäe (Pink Bird)” (1988), their waxy synthetic surfaces becoming a playful armour. Other works employ rural materials — a pair of sausagey, limb-like structures in “Composition with Ropes” (1983) were fashioned crudely by stuffing potato sacks then binding them with rope to wrangle in a violent, eternal embrace.
Põder’s works were held up in Estonian art schools as examples of what not to do. Today, the vocabulary of these early sculptures is more familiar and canonised — the soft textile sculptures can’t help but evoke Louise Bourgeois; a headless, standing mannequin, her body marked for butchery or pattern-making, in “Before Performance” (1981) recalls Isa Genzken’s more recent appropriations of shop-window dolls. High in the corners of the room is a later work, “Tested Profit. Rubber Dolls” (1999) — cheap, inflatable female sex dolls, their heads rammed into black cylinders, pinned to the wall with bricks. They bring Sarah Lucas’s brash sexual satire to mind.
Yet it seems from the sparse documentation of Põder that she didn’t know any of these artists. When she made these pieces, Estonia was closed off to the outside world. Her materials were expressions of hardship and scarcity in Estonia’s communist era and of her own dogged resourcefulness.
Materials propelled Põder’s work and they carried personal meanings. The family farm where the artist was raised provided many; upstairs are installations of heavy sheepskin and wool coats, heirlooms passed down through generations in her family, cut and stitched into new forms — the artist searching for a literal space, perhaps, for her own body in this heritage. In another room, a pair of rough-hewn wooden benches were also found on the farm. Elsewhere, Põder pours soap into faux-leather handbags, reviving the memory of her grandmother making soap by the barrel on the farm.
After the Soviet period, Põder’s work became wilder, weirder and harder to define. Moving chronologically, each room takes a surprising aesthetic turn, from a carnivalesque duo, large figures in limbering poses, to a whimsical, radiant purple textile and cardboard figure (“Coiled”, 1993), legs twisted into a taut pirouette, to stark, political works, such as a simple wooden lectern, charred black inside. She continued to experiment with materials — the final room of the exhibition presents a metal structure filled with Kinder chocolate eggs.
These works speak as much of the absence of bodies as of their cumbersome nature and the danger they impose. What unites the works is the tension between savagery and restraint, between her irreverent, fetishistic choice of materials and her violent treatment of them — slicing, slashing, dissecting, contorting. Põder’s defining characteristic is an aggressive beauty that is evoked in endlessly inventive ways.
The exhibition is generative and enthralling, and, by the end, exhausting. It is also exhaustive — the retrospective presents almost the entire Põder archive. A working single mother of three children, she was not able to be prolific, and when she died, aged 65, she left behind only 60 works. Forty-four have survived — more than 40 are presented in A Space for My Body. This first major international exhibition of Põder might also be the definitive Põder show.
To June 30, muzeumsusch.ch
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