Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni's work blurs the line between sculpture and performance art. She uses her body as a tool, using mundane activities such as eating and sleeping as artistic processes. For instance, in her work Gnaw (1992), she used her mouth to chew and spit out 600-pound cubes of chocolate and lard in the shapes of lipstick tubes and chocolate boxes, which she later displayed in a mock storefront. Continuing the legacy of body art and endurance performance, Antoni is interested in the psychological impact of pushing one’s body to extremes, often from a feminist approach. Her work also addresses repetition and discipline as can be seen in Touch, where Antoni appears to be walking on the surface of water after months of training to walk on a tightrope that she placed at the same height of the horizon line.

Antoni has had exhibitions of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, S.I.T.E. Santa Fe, and Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. She has also received a Painting and Sculpture Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award.