Heide Hatry grew up on a pig farm in the south of Germany. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. She studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg. She taught at a private art school for 15 years while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions and has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world. She has produced about 200 artist’s books and edited more than two dozen books and art catalogues. Her book Skin was published by Kehrer, Heidelberg, in 2005, Heads and Tales and Not a Rose by Charta, Milan/New York in 2009 and 2012 and Icons in Ash by Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY in 2017.
Heide Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles (and specifically what it means to be a woman), the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.