The Anatomist
2026
Framed colour print, colour print from a digital image collage, aluminium composite
80 x 60 cm (framed colour prints)
12,7 x 20 cm (colour print from a digital image collage)
12,7 x 200 cm (aluminium composite plates)
The series of works recreates scenes from two famous autopsy paintings. The paintings depicting anatomists performing autopsies on young women are recreated in the absence of the male anatomist.
Paintings depicting the autopsies of women often turn the female body into a spectacle. These intimate scenes, popular during the 19th century, often depict an anatomist standing beside a young, conventionally beautiful cadaver, gazing at her as if lost in thought.
Considered by some to be a form of punishment for the increasing societal agency of women, these paintings almost replaced the tradition of dissection scenes, which had mostly depicted male cadavers. Introducing new conventions to the tradition, images of the autopsies of female cadavers have also been understood as depicting the anatomist’s inner conflict, in which his roles as a man and as a scientist compete with one another.
The original paintings are presented here as postcards. Postcards reproducing Gabriel von Max’s The Anatomist (1869) and Enrique Simonet’s Anatomy of the Heart (1890) are known to have been distributed internationally. The postcards in this artwork are fictional versions of these historical postcards. The quotations featured on them are taken from authentic historical sources.
In Johanna Naukkarinen’s series The Anatomist, the cadaver wakes from death. She gazes at her own body and picks up an anatomical textbook. Whether or not you connect the book to Naukkarinen’s other work, a different message about the world is revealed to this newly awakened cadaver.
Person in the photographs: Laura Jalava
Source for the historical accounts presented here:
Neil Graham Holmström: Beautiful, Dead, Dissected: The Dismembered Female Body in Artistic Representation (2017)
The work in the exhibition Attractive Specimen, Galleria Mältinranta, 2026: