Study for Portrait of Lord Byron (Lord Byron Table)

In Study for a portrait of Lord Byron (Lord Byron Table), Goshka Macuga portrays the famous Romantic poet in a surprising format. Sat upon three pointed legs, the outline of a table forms the iconic profile of Byron’s face. His physical traits have become one with features of his turbulent life: stubble is created through an array of pen nibs; the base of a broken wine bottle adorns his ear, another shard indicating his nostril; a pair of scissors and a coin make a schematic eye, with his eyebrow a snipped lock of hair. Macuga, a nominee for the 2008 Turner Prize, is fascinated by the interrelations between aesthetics, politics and history, often interrogating the authorities by which the past is framed and revised. This work was commissioned for That Beautiful Pale Face Is My Fate (for Lord Byron), a 2008 exhibition at Newstead Abbey that attempted contact with the legendary poet and his legacy through ‘amorous séance’. Macuga’s unusual table takes an appropriately uncanny approach, seeming to posit that the poet himself has become part of the furniture: a spirit inhabiting our cultural environment through the Byronic fame and infamy that resound to this day.