Pyper

Lorenza Böttner

Nat Pyper 2025

1 online resource

"LORENZA BÖTTNER defied binaries. As a trans artist who drew, painted, and performed across the spectrums of discipline and gender, her work challenges the normative image of cis, able bodies and proposes ecstatic possibilities otherwise. Born in Chile in 1959 to a family of German immigrants, a childhood accident led to the amputation of both of her arms. She and her family later moved to Germany to gain access to better healthcare, and in that time she learned to paint with her mouth and feet. From 1978 to 1984 she studied at the Kassel School of Art and Design where she also began to dance and perform. What followed was an intense period of artistic production during which she made hundreds of works that were at once blissfully erotic, radically speculative, and daringly confrontational. In the mid-1980s she traveled to the US to study at New York University and began working with the Disabled Artists Network. As in Germany, the street was her studio and she was known for her dynamic public dance paintings. She later moved to Spain and in 1992 performed as Petra, the mascot of that year's Paralympics in Barcelona. Throughout her life, Böttner used her own body as a method and material to assert the power of transformation. In 1994, she died in Germany in the care of her family following complications related to AIDS. The philosopher and curator Paul Preciado, whose recuperative efforts have led to revived interest in Böttner's body of work, celebrates Böttner's capacity to "defy oblivion and historical erasure." The letterforms in this font are based on those Böttner drew for the title sequence of a short documentary about her life and work called Lorenza, directed by Michael Stahlberg in 1991. Gaps in the alphabet were filled by emulating existing forms as needed. This was completed in 2025 and is the eleventh font in A Queer Year of Love Letters."-- provided by distributor.

Graphic design (Typography)
Sexual minority culture.
Arts graphiques.
Culture des minorités sexuelles.

Software.
font.