KÖRPERWELTEN!!!

It was so kühl!

(That means "so cool," in case you didn't guess.  And Körperwelten, in case you missed it from yesterday, means Body Worlds.)

Marni and I went there today.  We left our house at 8:30 and walked through the Stadtpark to the next station down from Saarlandstraße (our closest stop) since it was a nice morning.  Then we took the U-Bahn to Hafen City, which is the harbor strip between downtown and the river.  Miniatur-Wunderland, the model-train place, is in this area, and there are lots of old industrial buildings and canals.  The Körperwelten exhibit was in a neat old building that I think was originally a warehouse or office building of some kind.

For anybody who doesn't know, the Body Worlds exhibits can be found worldwide in dozens of major cities.  There have been several temporary ones in the L.A. area over the last ten years or so--I think in some cities they are permanent.  Each exhibition contains preserved human bodies and body parts, kept in pristine condition by a revolutionary process called plastination.  The method was invented by a Polish scientist named Gunther von Hagens.  I don't understand how it all works, of course, but the basic idea is that they immerse the bodies in acetone to cause the body fluids to evaporate, and then place them in a special polymer solution and use a vacuum technique to draw the polymer into each cell where the cellular fluid once was.  The process halts decomposition, and essentially turns the body or organ into hard plastic which will never rot away or break down.  It's an incredible process because it allows the bodies and organs to be preserved with their original color and form--they aren't all brown and shriveled like the cadavers in a science lab, which are usually treated with formaldehyde.  (Plastinated bodies don't smell, by the way.  No nasty chemical fumes here!)  Which makes them absolutely ideal for educational purposes, and for drawing.  You are seeing the inside of the human body as it looks while you are still alive: pink muscles, white tendons, reddish/purplish/whitish organs.  They even have figured out how to plastinate only the circulatory and nervous systems so you can see what they look like by themselves!  If you're a medical student, scientist, or artist, it kind of takes anatomy to a new level.

The Hamburg exhibit just opened last month.  It's a really neat one!  For me, it didn't quite have the "wow, this is unbelievable" factor this time, only because I had already seen the one in California.  But boy, was it great for drawing!  Muscular structure perfectly preserved--I bet Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Dürer would have been absolutely obsessed with this!  The bodies in this exhibit were all donors who gave their consent to have their bodies plastinated after they had died.  From the facial structure I could tell that most of them were definitely from the northern European region.  Quite different from the bodies in the California exhibit, which were actually unidentified and unclaimed bodies acquired from morgues in China.

Sorry if I'm creeping anybody out . . . I just love learning about and drawing the human body (people have pretty much always been my favorite subjects), so the whole plastination thing is absolutely fascinating and so helpful to me.  I'll confess I can get a little overexcited at times.

Anyway, I'll shut up and just show you my drawings.  If you want to find out more about Body Worlds or plastination, you can check out the website here.

And yes, I was there for a long time.  Marni went home after about two hours because she had other stuff to do.  I stayed until after 3, which I think made about five hours total.  (I'm such a nerd . . . )

The bodies are placed in all kinds of interesting poses to show the human
body's various capabilities and demonstrate how the muscles engage.

Sometimes the displays have props too!

Yes, there were some fetuses and a few children as well . . .
I'm assuming the parents gave consent in those cases.

The gymnast was my favorite  :)

The Man on a Wheel!