Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy

Flesh and Bones traces anatomy as a shared language of art and science, where the body becomes medicine, cosmos, and a vessel for contemplating life, transformation, and afterlife. Expanding beyond Western traditions of anatomical study, the exhibition brings into dialogue diverse cultural practices that have long shaped how bodies are cared for, depicted, and understood.

For centuries, the human body has been examined through medicine, art, and scientific investigation. In Renaissance Europe, printed anatomical atlases transformed emerging medical knowledge into images that reshaped how the body was studied and imagined through collaboration among anatomists, artists, and printmakers. Yet across the world, other systems—ranging from holistic healing to ritual, cosmology, and indigenous medical lineages—developed parallel ways of mapping the body, each grounded in its own philosophies of health, spirit, and interconnectedness.

Anatomy was central to artistic training in Europe, and artists played a pivotal role in circulating anatomical knowledge. But anatomical representation has never been the product of observation alone. At the intersection of art, science, and culture, visual languages of the body evolved to balance precision with interpretation, whether articulated through printed atlases, sculptural models, or culturally specific practices that understood the body not only as structure, but as energy, lineage, and living memory.

Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy situates these histories within a broader global framework, examining anatomy as both scientific method and cultural construct—a space where knowledge, belief, and imagination converge, diverge, and co‑inform one another.

Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy features works from a project that originated at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. This exhibition has been expanded and reimagined by ArtScience Museum, in conversation with Getty. For the original exhibition, presented at the Getty Research Institute Galleries 22 February – 10 July, 2022, see getty.edu/anatomy.