Felix Gmelin
Kill Lies All After Pablo Picasso (1937) & Tony Shafrazi (1974)
1996
Oil on canvas
195 x 295 cm |
Kill Lies All is a reproduction of a section of Pablo Picasso's celebrated 1937 anti-war masterpiece Guernica following its defacement by young art student (and now art dealer) Tony Shafrazi while on loan to The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974.
Gmelin's painting takes its title from the words daubed by Shafrazi in red spray paint across the work's surface; an attempt, he claimed afterwards, "to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from history and give it life." The painting belongs to an ongoing series in which the artist meticulously replicates well-known paintings and sculptures as they appeared in the immediate aftermath of similar acts of vandalism or disfigurement. |