Hans Bellmer is an artist I have admired the work of, I went to see some of his work in Berlin and his work really inspired me to create dolls and look at dolls in my work. The way he depicts dolls in disturbing, fetishistic installations and images really makes me as a viewer question why I enjoy his work when it is in some ways creating women to look like pieces of meat with string around them and making them these dolls with adjustable hinges on their legs and on their bodies creating them as malleable objects that men can manipulate. These sex dolls are sometimes not even a full doll and may have more or less ligaments that a doll normally does. His surrealistic style of this erotic art is enchanting in the way of its obscurity and abstraction from the normality of sexual acts as a natural occurrence. The
dolls are not these normal dolls as they are not suitable for children. I believe these dolls are to make the viewer fantasize and create their own illusions of these female bodies. I am not saying it is Pornographic at all, especially for me as a viewer it isn’t but for others it might be. For me his work is showing the female body but not as it has been seen before he is not depicting it as beautiful as others would like to see it, but with this plastic abnormality of a sexual object and nothing more, the fact that some don’t even have heads or identities suggest that their purpose is not for them to be portraits or depictions of
beauty but are these adjustable, malleable objects that men can play with in their fantasies. His work really inspires me to bring dolls into my work and look at this idea of how women can be made into objects and playthings of others.
