Cathy Josefowitz: Forever Young

Hauser & Wirth on 69th Street is showing the work of artist Cathy Josefowitz (1956-2014), who lived between Western Europe and the Boston and New York regions, holding family roots in Woodstock, NY where she would spend many childhood summers. Largely self-taught, she started making art at a young age although her work expressed in painting and drawing was scarcely shown during her lifetime. This exhibition provides insight into her trajectory from her early days of painting the figure in Paris, to then engaging the body in movement through choreography as she immersed herself in Primal Theatre in 1978, (the work documented with video), which then developed into her lifelong dialogue with choreography, painting, and drawing.

Her early work, on the ground floor galleries, made while living in Paris, gives us a taste of the Parisian. Works include subjects that could be deemed so typically French, like a woman in tight pants carrying baguettes viewed from behind and looking back at us in Untitled (c.1975), a couple embracing with a baguette, a beret, and a milk bottle in hand seen in L’Accident et le chien evanouit (The Accident and the fainted dog) (1975), or couples kissing heatedly on a tiled floor in Untitled, (1974). The latter work in gouache is painted fast, hurriedly as a passionate kiss between two people dressed like acrobats in tights ensues, perhaps a clin d’oeil to Picasso’s rose period. All of these imagined scenarios suggest a performance with an audience, foreshadowing her later engagement with the stage. The subjects are the observations of an outsider’s view into Parisian life and serve as a way of warming up the senses. At a second glance, we see these early works are the first steps into Josefowitz’s lifelong commitment and engagement with the human body, bodily gestures or parts. Untitled (1976), is the lower half of a woman’s body exposing a dark and abundant 1970s-style pubic bush, while Untitled (1974) holds red as a prominent color alluding to carnal bodily pleasures. A woman has enclosed her red lips inside an empty glass, magnifying the attention paid to her mouth, which is also held by her red lacquered nails, accentuating traditionally feminine characteristics, all taking place in a crimson bedroom. Untitled (1977) is also a close-up study of someone savoring a snack, with a focus on the mouth. The discovery of the body and its senses is felt in these paintings as an opening or the start of a journey into becoming more in touch with one’s own body and its relationship to others.

During the summers in the late 1970s in the Boston region and Woodstock, Josefowitz went on to study and work with performers in theater and dance who were engaged in a choreography closer to everyday movements of the body. This community and its focus on engaging the body through the visceral act of performance was for her a culminating point, as it freed her own body, and with a free body, she herself felt free. Free from what, one might ask? She spent a great portion of her life composing choreographies and engaging the body in performance as seen in the works Woodstock (1983) in the lower gallery focused on a performer sitting at a desk with ordinary objects, and in the upper gallery through For Ever Young (1989), focused on two performers with a chair. In the latter gallery, we can observe two people; one person is sitting in a chair almost motionless, their back facing us, and another person is moving around, stomping, running, skipping, flying, crawling, and staying still, perhaps mapping out the space and slowly closing in onto the main event—the seated person. A dialogue between the two bodies evolves. The person seated on the chair, slowly turns over falling to the floor, merging body and chair. The paintings in this gallery show how Josefowitz was constantly moving between painting, choreography and performance centered on the body, this vessel of freedom for the artist. The paintings depict the person and the chair in the choreography piece, merging as one in Untitled (c. 1995).

Furthermore, the drawings in the adjacent gallery, taken from notebooks in 1979-80, and drawings with pastel on lined and gridded paper seem to emerge from a choreography. These are composed of quick gestures, perhaps to follow the bodies in motion before us, not meant to last long, like the performances themselves. Bodies embracing as in Untitled (c. 1979), merge into one another like the body and chair in the video. They seem to be dancing and enlaced, recalling simple pleasures, but with the bodies drawn so rough and awkwardly, we’re reminded of the discomforts also present when dancing with strangers or even close friends.

Before passing away from her battle with cancer, Josefowitz lived her later years in Switzerland and painted very large works almost devoid of anything but the suggestion of a corner of a stage or room as in both In the Pink Room (2010) and Looking in the Same Direction (2009). Their scale is like a large walled window in a modern home, but light and airy with fields of pink and baby blue, suggesting an innocence like the beginning of life. The spareness of these paintings recall some of the minimalist gestures present in her choreographies that come from life like sitting at a desk, squeezing a lemon, or walking in space, such as in Woodstock (1983), the choreography video at the entrance. In these two paintings, an interior room without a body calls for someone to walk, run, prance, or lie in it. A collaged drawing of a figure stuck onto the painting, looking in and at the space makes us long to move in it.

In Josefowitz’s work, we sense her questioning the self, the body the self inhabits, and when one gets to a point of ultimate freedom where the body disappears and all we have left is a stage. For Josefowitz, perhaps it was the feeling that someone has been there before us and touched us.