As part of the sale dedicated to modern and contemporary art on Thursday, July 9, 2020, PIASA auction house is offering for sale an emblematic work by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye created in 2003.
After training at the Ghent School of Fine Arts in Belgium, Wim Delvoye set up an artistic production that revolves around technological experimentation and the misuse of styles and motifs from the history of art.
At the end of the 1990s, the artist began to tattoo pigs in order to denounce the shortcomings of a society that had entered into hyper-consumption. Moreover, his "Art Farm" aims to open the debate on the issue of diet and animal trafficking.
In 2000, he presented "Cloaca" at the Mukha Museum in Antwerp, a machine work reproducing the process of digestion with scientific rigour. This closeness to the trivial ties the artist to a tradition inaugurated by Flemish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of the exhibition "Drawings and models" at the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain in Nice, Wim Delvoye exhibited seven tattooed pigs.
These pieces sparked a lively debate on the treatment of animals and the ethical limits of their use in contemporary art.
Wim Delvoye (born 1965)
Susana, 2003
Color ink on pig skin
Signed on the reverse
110 x 70 x 2,3 cm
Provenance : Private collection, Paris
The work offered for sale by PIASA's Modern and Contemporary Art Department is dated 2003. From a private collection, Susana is a drawing made with coloured inks on pigskin. In the centre of a mandorla referring to allegorical iconography, a lightly dressed woman is staring at the viewer. Her attitude, her hairstyle and her clothes are reminiscent of the feminine stereotypes of the 1950s, while several symbols seem to float around her. This piece, emblematic of the artist's aesthetics, is estimated between 45,000 and 65,000 euros.
Wim Delvoye, whose success knows no borders, was honoured in 2009 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, in 2010 at the Rodin Museum in Paris at the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain in Nice, in 2011 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in 2012 at the Louvre, in 2017 at the Tinguely Museum in Basel.
