Biography
Lorenza Böttner was a Chilean–German disabled transgender multidisciplinary visual artist. Born in Chile, she moved to Germany following the amputation of both of her arms as a child, where she studied and began a career in art.
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Lorenza Böttner was a Chilean–German disabled transgender multidisciplinary visual artist. Born in Chile, she moved to Germany following the amputation of both of her arms as a child, where she studied and began a career in art. Lorenza, whose specialty was self-portraiture, celebrated her armless body in paintings she created with her mouth and feet while dancing in public.
As a child, Lorenza showed an early talent for art and an affinity for birds. When she was 9, she climbed a transmission tower in the hopes of locating a nest and finding a baby bird to keep as a pet. Startled by a mother bird who suddenly opened her wings, Lorenza lost her balance and grabbed the live electrical cables hanging around her to avoid falling. Her arms were both severely burned up to the elbows and ultimately amputated at the shoulders. Lorenza and her mother, Irene, relocated to Germany after the accident, where she struggled through her recovery and, to the dismay of her doctors, rejected the use of prosthetic arms. As a teenager, Lorenza was depressed and apathetic and tried more than once to commit suicide. But her mother believed in her and her art; she put the pen in Lorenza’s mouth, and put the will to live through art into Lorenza. Self-portraiture soon became a cornerstone of her artistic practice. Her interest in performance was nurtured during her studies, and she developed a hybrid form of expression that she called ‘danced painting’. In 1984, Lorenza moved to NYC to study dance and performance at NYU with a grant from the Disabled Artists Network. She was a beloved figure among the city’s queer artists.
Throughout her lifetime, Lorenza created a multidisciplinary body of work with her feet and mouth that included painting, drawing, photography, dance and performance art. She made hundreds of paintings in Europe and America, dancing in public across large canvases while creating impressionistic brushstrokes with her footprints. Lorenza’s performance work eroticized the trans-armless body, endowing it with sexual and political potency. “I wanted to show the beauty of the crippled body,” she said in a short documentary about her life, “Lorenza — Portrait of an Artist” (1991). “I saw how many statues were admired for their beauty and, through an accident, they too had lost their arms — but have lost nothing of their aesthetic appeal.”
Though Lorenza did not achieve mainstream fame in her lifetime, her oeuvre (which criticizes both gender norms and the concept of disability) has in recent years been recognized as a significant contribution to the art-historical canon, in part for its radical representation of atypical bodies. Her work is full of hope, transformation and emancipation. A friend said of her art, “It’s not work about trans or disabled people being victims of the system, it’s a work of enormous political potency that has to be seen and given to the new generations.” In 1985, Lorenza learned that she was H.I.V. positive. The physical derailment that came with the illness made traveling and working more difficult toward the end of her life, which she spent largely in Germany and Spain. She died of AIDS-related complications on Jan. 13, 1994, in Munich. She was 34. Lorenza is remembered for her advocacy for trans people, disabled bodies, and for her contributions to art history.
International Transgender Day of Visibility
- Lifespan
- 1959-1994
- Nationality
- German-Chilean
- Occupations
- Performance artist, Visual artist
- Era
- Contemporary Art
- Born
- 1959 Reviewed
- Died
- 1994 Reviewed
- Tags
- German-Chilean, Contemporary Art, Performance artist, Visual artist
- Themes
- Arts and Culture, Global History