Artissima 2026: Cathy Josefowitz

IMPORT EXPORT and east contemporary galleries jointly present works from the Estate of Cathy Josefowitz (b. 1949 in New York; d. 2014 in Geneva). The solo presentation of the artist’s work is part of the section Back to the Future. Curated by Heike Munder and Jacopo Visconti Crivelli, the section focuses on the rediscovery of pioneers of contemporary art. Since its inception, Back to the Future was conceived as a rearview mirror that allows us to look back at artistic practices that, while dating from decades ago, are still relevant and poignant today.

 

The collaborative solo booth has been recognized  and selected by Annette Amberg, Director of Kunsthaus Glarus selected as part of The Curators’ Choice, the programme supported by Fondazione Arte CRT.

Born in New York in 1956 and raised in Geneva, Cathy Josefowitz developed a practice that moved between drawing, painting, and dance. From early on, she understood the body not as a fixed form, but as a repository of experience, vulnerability, desire, and resistance. In her notebooks, she drew dreams, inner images, and bodily states; at the same time, in her choreographic works, she searched for a language in which movement, memory, and painting could intersect.

During her studies at Dartington College of Arts in the UK with Steve Paxton and Mary Fulkerson, Josefowitz connected contemporary dance, Contact Improvisation, and anatomical release techniques with her visual practice. In choreographies such as Woodstock (1983) and For Ever Young (1989), everyday gestures, childhood memories, loss, and community are translated into fragile images of movement. Later, she began her painting processes with a dance: the body became an instrument that transferred traces, rhythm, and energy onto the surface.

For Josefowitz, the political lies not only in her explicit activism for feminist and queer movements, but also in dreams, embodiment, and the assertion of vulnerable inner worlds. Her art resists by allowing the body to remember, to dream, to fall, to desire — and nevertheless to remain in motion.