Lot 354 | Untitled (From Performance VB64)

BEECROFT, VANESSA
1969 Genoa

Title: Untitled (From Performance VB64).
Date: 2008.
Technique: Three female figures out of hard black Paraffin wax, each lying on a steel table.
Measurement: Sculpture 1: ca. 167,5 x 38 x 21,5cm / Table: 172,5 x 43,5 x 62,5xm.
Sculpture 2: ca. 185,5 x 53 x 28cm / Table: 190,5 x 58 x 62,5cm.
Sculpture 3: ca. 178 x 52 x 30cm / Table: 190 x 62 x 62,5cm.

These installations have the copy number: 1/3. Enclosed with the work is a certificate of authenticity by the artist. Here signed and dated: WBeecroft08. Additionally, information about the work as well as numbering.

Provenance:
- Deitch Projects, New York

Exhibitions:
- me Collectors Room, Berlin 2014/2015
- Museum Arnheim, 2016

Literature:
- Stiftung Olbricht (ed.): Queensize - Female Artists from the Olbricht Collection, Berlin 2015, ill. p. 130f.

The performance artist Vanessa Beecroft was born in Genoa, the daughter of a British man and an Italian woman. There, she first studied architecture and then stage design in Milan. Since 1994, the artist has staged her performances worldwide, acting more as a director and often using female models for her productions, which she directs from the background.
The three black sculptures are part of Beecroft's performance VB64. VB64 is inspired by the Sicilian funeral sculpture of the Renaissance. The first version of the work was presented in July 2008 in the apse of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo. Beecroft staged the American version of the performance at Deitch Studios in New York on March 9th, 2009. In the main room of the performance, 20 female models, painted with white body paint, lie on and next to white concrete pedestals, which have a coffin-like aesthetic. In the spaces in between are scattered some white sculptures, cast from the live models and hardly distinguishable from them. As a visual counterbalance to the white models, nine plaster sculptures covered with black microcrystalline wax lie in the adjacent room, as if laid out.
Beecroft, whose works initially revolve exclusively around the theme of gender identity, uses VB64 to explore the relationship between sculpture, performance and real life. Beecroft not only puts this relationship in the spotlight, but also focuses on the tension between life and death.