Installation view.

Born Ernst Lorenz Böttner in Chile in 1959, at eight he lost both his arms in an accident. Institutionalized in Germany, where he moved with his mother for treatment, he rejected prosthetics intended to compensate for his supposed disability. In art school, he started identifying as female and assumed the name Lorenza. Although her career spanned just sixteen years, Lorenza Böttner created over 200 individual works, painting with her feet and mouth and using dance, photography, street performance, drawing, and installation to celebrate the complexity of embodiment and gender expression. Casting herself as a ballerina, a mother, a young man with glass arms, a Greek statue, Böttner’s work is irreverent and hedonistic, filled with the artist’s joy in her own body.

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Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.