The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies has collaborated on editions with several artists who have reconfigured traditional notions of the human body as a means of exploring myth, identity, cultural taboos and personal narratives in images that range from the sublime to the grotesque. The artists represented in this selection have worked primarily in painting and drawing or sculpture and photography yet came to the Neiman Center with the desire to rethink their images in printed form. Their results were wide and varied but stand together in their common interest in the body as an enduring emblem capable of expressing diverse ideas and conveying myriad stories.

In the series, Blackout, Gardner depicts drunken young men either joking together, alone in an alcoholic haze or sneering at the viewer with obvious disregard and disdain. Much like a snapshot, his drawings freeze the fleeting, often awkward, gestures of his disillusioned subjects. Here, Gardner crops the heads of his subjects revealing their grotesque expressions close-up in the spirit of Frans Hals’s (Dutch, 1582/3-1666) paintings of drunken revealers.

This image, taken from Ledare’s ambitious print project An Invitation, documents the artist’s commission by a respected writer to take a series of erotic photographs of her over the course of a week. She kept a set of the photographs and Ledare kept another. For the resulting series, he redacted any evidence of the woman’s identity and superimposed the photograph onto an enlarged copy of the front page of The New York Times corresponding to the day the photograph was taken. He added handwritten text to the bottom of the print – a personal journal entry of sorts – commenting on the project and the fuzzy line between privacy and publicity.

This image is taken from Neshat’s cinematic series of nine photogravures which use the simple gesture of a woman’s hands opening and closing in prayer to create a sense of universal solemnity and grace. The hands are overlaid with text from a poem on the sacredness of wine by Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), a Persian poet and mystic. Born in Iran, Neshat often employs the female body as a site for exploring the relationship between women and the religious and cultural values of Islam.

Schutz created a macabre series of paintings in the early 2000s that were based on the premise “What if people could eat themselves.” Their brightly colored palette and wildly distorted forms – much like those in this woodcut – bely the seemingly disturbing nature of Schutz’s narrative, making them appear strangely lighthearted and humorous.