Angela Grauerholz: La femme 100 tÛtes / The Hundred Headless Woman

La femme 100 tÛtes / The Hundred Headless Woman presents over 150 portraits of 100 womenùsome acquaintances, some strangersùtaken by Angela Grauerholz over a 30-year period and presented for the first time in this book. Collaging diverse photos made with various cameras and technologies with text fragments from a range of mostly female authors, Grauerholz creates a hybrid between a magazine and book that forms a complex portrait of women.

The title La femme 100 tÛtes is borrowed from Max ErnstÆs 1929 Surrealist collage novel of the same name, in which he combined cut-up and reassembled nineteenth-century illustrations with bizarre captions. Grauerholz welcomes the double entendre of ErnstÆs titleùwhen read aloud in French it means both ôthe hundred-headed womanö and ôthe headless womanöùto create a sense of womanhood intricately individual and violently anonymous. The intentionally quotidian nature of GrauerholzÆs photos blurs the ôclassö distinctions between images in an art context, in

Born in Hamburg in 1952, Angela Grauerholz studied graphic design and literature before moving in 1976 to Montreal where she completed a master’s degree in photography at Concordia University. From 1988 to 2017 she was professor of photography and book design at the École de design, Université du Québec. Grauerholz has exhibited at the Kunstverein Hannover, the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the National Gallery of Canada, and has participated in events including the Sydney Biennale and documenta IX. In 2006 she received Quebec’s Prix Paul-Émile Borduas, in 2014 the Canada Council’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and in 2015 the Scotiabank Photography Award published by Steidl.