Study for Portrait of Lord Byron (Lord Byron Table)

细节

Goshka Macuga (B. 1967)
Study for Portrait of Lord Byron (Lord Byron Table)
acrylic, wood, ink, calligraphy pen nibs, found scissors, human hair, sixpence coin, steel, found paper and glass
overall: 31 7/8 x 43 3/8 x 45 7/8in. (81 x 110.3 x 116.4cm.)
Executed in 2006

来源

Flora Fairbairn Projects, London.
Acquired from the above in 2007.

展览

Nottingham, Nottingham Contemporary, That Beautiful Pale Face is my Fate (for Lord Byron), 2008.
London, Saatchi Gallery, Newspeak: British Art Now, 2010 -2011. This exhibition later travelled to St Petersburg, the State Hermitage Museum.

注意事项

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 20% is payable on hammer price and buyer's premium

拍场告示

Please note that the correct execution date for this work is 2004 and not as stated in the printed catalogue.

拍品专文

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.