Here are a few examples of how artists use the body or anatomy in a range of ways to explore and communicate different messages and

create meaning.

BODY/ANATOMY

Many of Gormley’s works are based on mould’s taken from his own body. His work explores the relationship of the human body and the space it finds itself in.

ANTHONY GORMLEY

Andrea Dezsö, a visual artist and writer who creates deeply personal narratives across a broad range of media including drawing, artist's books, cut paper, embroidery, sculpture, site-specific installation, animation and large scale public art.

ANDREA DEZSO

ANNETTE MESSAGERMessager deals with issues of sexual and physical abuse, fragmentation of the body, sin, obsession with appearances, fairy tales, children, symbols, effigies, disguise, distortion, repetition. The work is often executed using traditionally feminine materials and techniques.

On this page, artworks based on ethnicity, dogma and class by Ellen Gallagher.

ELLEN GALLAGHEREllen Gallagher built fantastical modernist structures in yellow (blonde?) plasticine onto the model's heads which screamed against discreet assimilation - 'Hello! We're here!'

Kiki Smith has created some of the most powerful imagery about women in her artworks. Her body art is imbued with political significance, and often exposes the inner biological systems of females as a metaphor for hidden social issues.

KIKI SMITH

LEONARDO DA VINCIVitruvian Man: The drawing is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions.

Influenced by Cubism and the Futurists and credited with inventing Constructivism, Gabo had a unique approach to sculpting the human face.

NAUM GABO

BRUCE NAUMAN

“Fifteen Pairs of Hands” from 1996 are cast from life, bronze sculptures on a pedestal always using 2 hands to construct a gesture, a form in space. Almost as an alphabet is used to spell words, these sculptures spell out part of our human gestural environment.

Jenny Saville’s works are bright, bold, and in your face. She works mainly from nude figures, and loves the over exaggeration of color, and composition. This also allows her to represent the human skin in her own masterful ways.

JENNY SAVILLE

MARC QUINNQuinn’s work displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Using an uncompromising array of materials, from ice and blood to glass, marble or lead, Quinn develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works that are mostly figurative in form.

A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative and engaging works, contains an actual life cycle. Maggots hatch inside a white minimal box, turn into flies, then feed on a bloody, severed cow's head on the floor of a claustrophobic glass vitrine. Above, hatched flies buzz around in the closed space. Many meet a violent end in an insect-o-cutor; others survive to continue the cycle all over again.

DAMIEN HIRST

HAN HYO-SEOK Seoul artist, Han Hyo Seok, created portraits of people he knows based on photographs, and his style is to render his human subjects in the textures of animal meat as found in a butcher's shop.

Both artists share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression. Their work touches upon these themes but they don’t communicate this directly. “We work in a primitive and limitless way creating future human shapes discovering low tech ways for human enhancement.”

LUCY AND BART