The Exquisite Corpse - Luxury Splash of Art

Plunging deep into their psyches to create absurd stories, André Breton, Man Ray and other Surrealists were enchanted by the game, the drawings that reflected “the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” It was a collegial fun fest, combining mystery and provocation with boundless experimenting in the 1920s. Creativity totally unleashed, unpredictable and mad-cap fun. Breton, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy, for example, would send a drawing of a head to another Surrealist. That would, in turn, lead to this artist, and other participants adding to the “corpse,” a torso, legs, and ultimately all sorts of amusing skeletal figures took shape–with misshapen heads, animal-like features, phalluses, and ridiculously gargantuan inventions. It was a whimsical, improvisational game well-suited for sitting and drawing in French cafes.

Now, to reduce the loneliness induced by the Pandemic, free-spirited artist and curator Kasia Kay is imbuing this hide-n-seek, experimental navigation with contemporary provocation. Relying on “micro-drawings” and “collaborative compositions,” Kay’s liberating and rebellious platform is “calling attention to race, social unrest, adjustment and transformation.” Hoping her own Exquisite Corpse Now project will again unite artists in free-floating creativity, Kay, an artist and former Chicago gallerist (for 10 years), explains, “I’m enlisting artists all over the world, like the very-renowned Paulina Olowska, to take a turn, conceal their artwork, and to pass it along… to participate in the ECN ‘game.’ I want them to reflect on the new normal…conceive of their futuristic vision of it. Consistently the experimentalist, the provocateur willing to upset status quo equilibrium, Kay is defiantly in the Surrealist mold.

As mirrored in her many art and curating projects, she too dotes on illogical juxtapositions, visual puns, spontaneity and the bizarre. She might liken corpses to a “game,” one that will “activate the subconscious,” but Kay is also the serious liberator, the agitator eschewing all “conventional” art experiences. Preferring “hybrid” creativity instead, the unabashedly curious, multi-disciplinary, and unpredictable, Kay, usually comfortably-dressed in funk-it-up black outfits, transformed her West side Chicago space into Andy Warhol’s Factory, and wrapped a 17-foot U-Haul truck into a Hebru Brantley canvas mural.

“I love bringing topics that inspire, I just wasn’t free enough at the gallery (Kasia Kay Art Projects closed in 2017), and now I am, fighting the fight,” says Kay, pointing to a pair of her sculpted bronze and leather boxing gloves to emphasize “fighting to have a voice.” Inspired by other freedom fighters, like Tamara Lempicka and Marina Abramovic, Kay’s designed two stunning gold and silver rings, Soft Touch (faux fur boxing gloves) and symbolizing the strength of women, Celestial Week, seven painted bronze Goddesses (the Moon, Sun and other celestial bodies atop their heads).

Again glorifying women, the power solidarity in the face of suppression, Kay recently exhibited Human Race, Only, her bronze beads sculpture, a Zen-like piece resembling prayer beads (each is 1 ½ inches in diameter) in Venice. Heralded for its simplicity and grace, the piece later won more acclaim last year in Brussels, spearheading a billboard campaign promoting the “Art Beyond Borders–Cube Art Fair.” “Outraged” that women still have to wear “boxing gloves” to protest sexist inequities, Kay continues to poke and provoke male-dominated hierarchies. Condemning the Polish government’s recent ban on nearly all abortions–a stripping of “human rights”–she designed Lady Lightning, a bold, LED Flex-neon logo/sculpture with a flashing breast and buttocks that honors women’s “sexiness, courage and electric charge.” Kay hopes it will be a beacon of light for women everywhere.