- Year of birth, place
- 1947, Baltimore
- Role at the ZKM
- in the collection
- Biography
- Maureen Connor was born in Baltimore in 1947. She studied at the Pratt Institute, New York, completing an MA in Fine Arts in 1973. She has received a number of study grants and awards, for example a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. She lives in New York and teaches at Queens College (part of the City University of New York).
The starting point for Maureen Connor's varied work is sculpture. Since the late 1970s she has incorporated a very wide range of objects into her sculptural pieces: clothing, steel, cast glass, lipstick and various utensils. In the early phase of her career, she produced a series of sculptures made out of clothes belonging to members of her family. Another such series, the »Linens« of 1980, was based on a book on the art of folding table napkins. During the 1980s she placed glass organs and female underwear on the spokes of a glass-drying rack, thus virtually humanizing it - in contrast to Marcel Duchamp's ready-made. Since the early 1990s Connor has produced video installations. In these (for example »The Senses« of 1992), the monitor, with its moving image, is an integral component. Often treated ironically in Connor's work, the female body and the role of women in society are central to her concerns.
Individual exhibitions (selection)
1980 Acquavella Contemporary Art, New York
1981 Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
1982 Acquavella Contemporary Art, New York
1986 Alfred Kren Gallery, New York
1989 Galerie Alfred Kren, Cologne
1992 »The Senses«, Germans van Eck, New York
1994 »Discreet Objects«, The Alternative Museum, New York
1995 »Dancing Lessons«, P.P.O.W., New York
1996 »Taste«, Galerie Sima, Nuremberg
Group exhibitions (selection)
1983 »The Bayou Show«, Houston, Texas; »Four Sculptors«, Fine Arts Center Gallery, Stonybrook, New York
1984 »Abstract Presence«, Defacto, New York
1985 »A Decade of Visual Art at Princeton: Faculty 1975-1985«, The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton; »Between Drawing and Sculpture«, The Sculpture Center, New York
1986 »Time After Time«, Diane Brown Gallery, New York; »Creativity«, Santa Maria di Castello, Genua
1987 »Material Sense«, The Sculpture Center, New York
1988 »Body Fragments«, Shea and Becker Gallery, New York; »The Other New York«, Galerie Alfred Kren, Cologne
1990 »Fragments, Parts, Wholes, the Body and Culture«, White Columns Gallery, New York; »Group Show«, Roy Boyd Gallery, Los Angeles; »Form and Fetish«, Sorkin Gallery, New York
1991 »New York, New York«, San Francisco Museum of Art Rental Gallery, San Francisco; »The Lick of the Eye«, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles; »New Generations: New York«, Carnegie Melon Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; »After Duchamp«, Galerie 1900-2000, Paris
1992 »A Marked Difference«, Maatschappij Art et Amicitiae, Amsterdam
1993 »MultiMediale 3«, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; 1993 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, subsequently at The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; »MENSCHENWELT (Interieur)«, Portikus, Frankfurt/M, subsequently at Costello di Rivara, Turin; Norwich Gallery, Norwich, and at venues in Stuttgart and Münster
1994 »Home Video Redefined: Media, Sculpture and Domesticity«, Center of Contemporary Art, Kingsley, Miami; »Members Only«, Carlos Poy Gallery, Barcelona; »In the Lineage of Eva Hesse«, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Buffalo
1995 »Configura 2«, Dialog der Kulturen, Erfurt; »In Three Dimensions: Woman Sculptors of the 90's«, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Newhouse Gallery for Contemporary Art, Staten Island; »Sculpture as Objects: 1915-1995«, Curt Marcus Gallery, New York
1996 »Der telematische Raum II«, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin; »The Visible and the Invisible: Representing the Body in Contemporary Art and Society«,
Institute of International Visual Arts, University College, London; »mäßig und gefräßig«, MAK- Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna; »Sexual Politics«, The Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
1997 »Video Installations - Maureen Connor, Tony Oursler«, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
[Katharina Raab, 1997]
