Rosemarie Castoro Past | Present

In a short clip released by the Centre Pompidou, Christine Macel, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, explains the subtle feminist innuendo of Rosemarie Castoro's artwork Armpit Hair (1972) following the museum's acquisition. 

Working in close dialogue with minimal art, American artist Rosemarie Castoro (1939–2015) declared herself ‘a paintersculptor’, transcending the medium-specificity of painting by giving the brushstroke a sculptural quality, enlarged to an enormous scale within the surrounding architecture. 

In Armpit Hair (1972), a single giant brushstroke stretches across the wall, extending itself through its impressive scale with a uniformly applied, thick impasto. The rapidity of execution of the imagined brushstroke contrasts with the laborious process of its construction, as it was carefully crafted out of Masonite, wood, gesso, graphite and modelling paste. In this work, Castoro plays out the fantasy of being ‘a giant caught in a building’, performing gigantic brushstrokes in her studio that are also stand-ins for her own body parts.