Sense and Sexuality of the Female Body

Since the 1960s, the feminist art movement has critically challenged the historical positioning of women as passive muses within the patriarchal studio system, questioning the aesthetic and ideological appropriation of the female body. This chapter examines how artists such as Suzanne Santoro, Alina Szapocznikow, and Mira Schor have subverted dominant visual regimes by reclaiming the body through fragmentation, self-representation, and material experimentation. Santoro uses skin casts and composite imagery of vulvas and flora to disrupt normative ideals and affirm bodily specificity. Szapocznikow’s imprints—mutilated, reassembled, and erotically charged—destabilise traditional sculptural tropes and evoke the tension between violence and sexuality. Schor reclaims paint itself as a metaphor for the fluid materiality of feminine embodiment, resisting objectification through the medium’s viscosity. Building on these precedents, the author reflects on his own studio methodology, in which he collaborates with a female model to create casts of her body. These casts are painted, fragmented, and displayed in box structures that eroticise without idealising, challenging the conventional roles of male artist and female subject. The chapter proposes a relational aesthetics rooted in shared vulnerability, collaboration, and the subversive potential of embodied practice.