PIASA organizes a Modern and Contemporary Art auction on Wednesday, June 1st, 2022.
With 42 lots, this auction featured works by international artists relatively rare on the French market, such as Danh Võ with a monumental sculpture in hammered copper.
We The People by Danh Võ (2011-2013), a dynamic copper drapery, is both monumental and enigmatic. As part of the highly ambitious We The People project, it is a powerful investigation into the fractures of self, belonging and identity. For two years, Võ recreated the entire 93-metre long Statue of Liberty using copper sheets no thicker than two pennies. Instead of assembling its component parts into a single unit, the artist spread the 267 sections around the globe.
Danh VÕ (b.1975)
We The People (Detail), 2011-2016
Estimate: 80 000 / 120 000 €
The work on display is a section of the dress under the statue's right arm; other elements have travelled to major exhibitions, such as the 2014 exhibition at City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, and are held in public collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich.
Lady Liberty's American ideals, welcoming arrivals to New York since 1886, are disjointed and spread; the life-sized encounter with her flowing garments in this work is both abstract and curiously intimate. This stunning fragment echoes minimalist sculpture just as much as the ruins of an ancient colossus.
Võ raises challenging questions about idealism and national identity while an monument of democracy is shattered and exposed to the world. A century after Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi began construction of the Statue of Liberty in the 1870s, Võ's family left South Vietnam for the United States. He was four years old. Their boat was intercepted by a Danish container ship, and in 1979 they moved to Denmark, where the artist grew up.
Võ's approach to the sculpture is therefore the product of a complex experience reflected in the making of the artwork: if its aspiration echoes her own family's attempt to reach the United States, We The People also complicates an already complex history.
In most of his works, the artist uses purchased objects and family artefacts with strong historical connotations: personal biography is mixed with world history. The original Bartholdi statue was a gift from France to the United States after their victory in the American Civil War. Võ's version was financed by his French gallery Chantal Crousel, made in Shanghai and shipped around the world. In our era of global economies and narratives, we still have to put the pieces together ourselves.
