Artistic work
- scultura
Author
Stored in
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurigo (Svizzera)
Work technique
teschio di orso bruno, legno, cotone, vetro, pelle animale. pittura, lacci di plastica
Year
Work dimensions
205 x 75 x 158 cm
Link
Tags
In 2017 Jimmie Durham held a personal exhibition, entitled God's Children, God's Poems. For the occasion, he presented a group of fourteen large sculptures, made with the skulls of the largest European mammals, object of systematic oppression due to hunting or the action of intensive farming. Many of these activities are concentrated precisely in Europe, a large number in Switzerland, the state in which not by chance Durham decides to stage his modern zoological assembly, inviting the viewer to reflect on the mechanisms of domination that the Western human being has applied towards otherness animal. Brown bear, for example, reproduces the body of a brown bear, one of the largest carnivores earthlings, protagonist of many of our myths and legends. But since humans turn to it as a potential threat, it has been progressively decimated and permanently eradicated in numerous habitats. The vigor and majesty associated with the animal comes therefore reduced to the marrow by the artist's sculptural operation. From the underside of the skull a drape of laces emerges, red which visually recalls the gushing of blood, as if the mammal had been mortally wounded, pierced by a human weapon.
