X-Ray Man
- Year1970
- Materialcrylic, pencil, and colored pencil on canvas
- On viewGround floor
- CopyrightLynn Hershman Leeson, X-Ray Man, 1970
© Lynn Hershman. Courtesy Paul van Esch, Amsterdam
More about the artwork
For six decades now, the American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has been dealing with the latesttechnologies. In her works, she investigates the effects that digital surveillance, artificial intelligence,and DNA programming, for example, have on society and our bodies. Her early collages and drawingstestify to a great interest in the interaction of body and machine. “X-Ray Woman” reveals the interiorof a body in which gears and construction drawings alternate with joints, and devices areinterchangeable with organs. The title refers to the technology of X-rays, which can make visible whatis hidden inside the body. The same is true of the work “X-Ray Man”: the smoking person with an appliquéd plastic prosthesis, a visor, and a sprayed-on outline of an orange heart was created just a few years after the first heart transplant took place (and failed) in the United States.
