Friederike Pezold (1945)
Austria

Friederike Pezold (1945) lives and works in Vienna. She detailed the exploration of the female body and femininity as such. After studying art and philosophy in Munich, she began her artistic career at the end of the 1960s. Derive shapes and figures from the contours of the female body. In the early 1970s, Pezold finally discovered video as a means of artistic expression. She created her first video graphics and began working on The New Embodied Sign Language. In this video, she fragments her own body and offers a detailed look at each part. Her genitals, breasts, thighs, eyes and mouth – all painted in black and white – are shown separately in long sequences. Through her slow movements, she evokes different images, letting the female body transform into a set of abstract signs. Pezold's video works critically on the role of women and their corporeality, but it does not subscribe to the classic feminist discourse of the 70s. Through the incorporation of Eastern and Western aesthetics or nature and Rather, technology, abstractions and reductions of the body constitute the archaic role of women in natural, cultural and religious life. Later in the 1970s, Pezold improved his approach to feminine aesthetics by creating the video sculpture Madame Cucumatz, imagined on five television screens placed one on top of the other. The video, for the artist, presents the further development of the pencil, the moving image becomes the drawing. However, it allows us to break the classic dualism of painter and model, of subject and object, it allows us to go beyond time and space and therefore to deconstruct the composition of images.