Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Virgin (exposed)
Damien Hirst British
Not on view
Virgin (Exposed) provocatively reimagines Edgar Degas’s The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer as a pregnant specimen, while its title references the Virgin Mary and the Immaculate Conception. Its garish colors recall the anatomical models and illustrations found in physicians’ offices. Partially flayed and cross-sectioned, the work also evokes historical anatomical female figures whose abdomens could be opened, often to prurient effect, to reveal reproductive organs. However, here there is no frisson of revelation and concealment, and instead the female interior is unsparingly exposed in the public space of a gallery.
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