The exhibition “Strip to the bones” curated by Clément Caballero, establish a dialogue between Barbara Hammer’s cinematic work Sanctus (1990) and a new series of abstract paintings on studded paper and canvas by Margaux Meyer.

Both artists reject classical forms of representation and break with a certain aesthetic tradition; experimental cinema replaces genre cinema, and abstraction supplants figuration. Their thinking is shaped by reactions and sensations that place the body at the center of their work. Their practices revolve around phenomenological elements sensitive and gestural—manifesting as a powerful organic, then erotic tension, allowing the depicted subjects to exist freely.

Meyer’s paintings depict bodies in perpetual mutation, freed from physical constraints, where organic tissues stretch to the point of ecstasy or decay, evoking natural cycles and the image of a “carrion-body.”

As a reversal of the expression “striptease,” “Strip to the bones” breaks away from traditional social codes that sexualize the body. The aim is to deconstruct established, androcentric assumptions. The exhibition also emphasizes the internal perceptive phenomena of the female body—such as menstrual fluids and mucous membranes— and highlights their emancipatory and de-alienating functions, in opposition to the fantasy-images driven imposed by patriarchal societies.

In her book On Female Body Experience, Iris Marion Young argues that the subject emancipates itself from male alienation by reclaiming their own personal experiences. For both Margaux Meyer and I.M. Young, this emancipation originates in the belly, as a sensitive epicenter.

Margaux Meyer x Barbara Hammer → Strip to the bones