ORLAN

(French, born 1947)

ORLAN is a contemporary French artist known for the radical act of changing her appearance with plastic surgery in the name of art. Similar to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, ORLAN uses her face and body as malleable tools for shifting identities. “I have been the first artist to use aesthetic surgery in another context—not to appear younger or better according to the designated pattern. I wanted to disrupt the standards of beauty,” she explained. Born Mireille Porte on May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne, France, she changed her name at the age of 15 before studying painting as a young woman. During the 1970s, the artist produced a provocative series of photographs known as Incidental Striptease (1974–1975), in which she took the pose of Sandro Botticelli’s Venus while wrapped in semen-stained sheets. ORLAN began using cosmetic surgery in the early 1990s, basing her new features on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) and François Boucher’s depiction of the goddess Europa. As part of the project, she had her cheekbones, brows, and lips altered. In 2018, the artist was ordered to pay Lady Gaga and Universal Music Group a total of $18,000 in courts fees, after losing her appeal in an intellectual property infringement lawsuit against the pop star. ORLAN currently lives between New York, NY, Paris, France, and Los Angeles, CA. Today, her works are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.