Anu Põder Pushed Delicacy to the Brink of Brutality

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Growing up, Anu Põder wanted to be a ballerina. But her small body failed to conform to the discipline’s impossible standards, so she turned to art, where misfit physiques soon became her primary preoccupation. The feminine forms that resulted—made of materials including fat, surgical plastic, and found fashion—comprise the Estonian artist’s retrospective “Anu Põder: Space for My Body” at Switzerland’s Muzeum Susch, a picturesque private institution carved into the side of a mountain. The show is curated by Cecilia Alemani, on the heels of the late artist’s inclusion in Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale.

Põder’s figurative sculptures can be roughly divided into two camps: porous and plastic. Works of the permeable, penetrable variety include Limsijad (Lickers), 2007—a series of dangling busts made of wire mesh, with holes here and there patched over with aluminum foil. Mostly, the metal is a kind of armature supporting the main event: giant pink satin tongues, flexed and pointed upward. This silly cage-like sculpture feels at once protected and open. It is extremely delicate, but if you touched it, it would hurt you. You’re left unsure whether the viewer or the object has more power to inflict damage. The humor eases this thrilling tension.

Delicacy is similarly pushed to the brink of brutality in porous works Põder made from garments, often excising planes of fabric to leave behind only the seams. Ruum minu keha jaoks (Space for My Body), 1995, overlays just the hems of three shirts—in pink, white, and black—plus some shoulder pads. The lines dangle from a robust wooden hanger that gives them volume. It is easy to envision a torso in the negative space. The harsh contours of this exoskeleton read as protective, like armor or a cage. Yet the soft, torn nature of the fabric exudes an almost pathetic vulnerability.

Anu Põder: Space for My Body (Ruum minu keha jaoks), 1995.

Põder excised other garments in the ’90s, too: bags, coats, shoes, all found and worn. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she became fascinated by consumer culture, which was new to her, so she turned to such mass-produced goods. Before that, while working in the Soviet Union, she had preoccupied herself with the various ways that bodies resist conforming to standards of the idealized laborer. It helped that during this time she was not an official artist working for the state: instead, she made her income as a teacher, allowing her some creative freedom. A single mother of three children, she maintained a studio in her state-provided apartment, where she avoided materials she could not lift and transport on her own.

In the ’80s, before the fall, there were the plastics. The plastic she used is surgical, with a peachy tone that evokes the body even when her forms are more abstract. She sourced the material from her brother, a doctor, and a room at Muzeum Susch is dedicated to her plastic works, all scattered across one giant plinth. In these sculptures, most of them torsos, brown burlap is stitched into pink plastic, at times bolstered by cork forms. Most constructions have a face, a neck, or breasts—or some combination thereof—and approach varying degrees of abstraction. The forms are roughly life-size, and the features are guideposts that invite you to relate to its form with your own physique.

There is a mix of careful exactitude and repetitive, unrelenting violence in the way she stitches into the flesh. Surrounding the plinth, inflatable sex dolls with black tubes for heads appear attached to the wall haphazardly under the crush of cinder blocks—as if someone threw the heavy brick at them, thrusting their air-filled bodies across the room and pinning them down. The doll installation, Tested Profit. Rubber Dolls (1999), is joined by a few other works that convey abjection and violence in similarly direct ways. One, Kaekott (Handbag), 1997, is a “purse” with a leather handle affixed to a lump of soap made of fat, as is tradition. Another, Oksaaugud (Knotholes), 2003, is a table penetrated by bones, their joints adding bumps to its wooden surface. With these works, Põder reminds her viewers of the everyday violence behind ordinary objects, made out of once-living beings—a message that couldn’t be more important for the way it addresses aggression that shouldn’t feel normalized. Yet her sculptures are most effective when they bring up complicated feelings that make us aware of the ways we’ve accepted—and are even drawn to—various bodily violations and vulnerabilities. Põder’s strongest works are those that attract as they repel, and that make you question whether you’re threatened or the threat.