Adam’s Apple
Painted bronze
2006
A bronze cast of an apple core, thin at one end and fat at the other, with a long stalk and pips showing, painted to look real.
Eaten and then thrown away, Turk takes the discarded, shrivelled and dead and gives it new life in the form of miniature painted bronze sculptures. Heavy with the symbolism of an English Eden, these once ripe fruits, alongside their associations with knowledge and temptation, Adam’s apple and of course, Eve, have been discarded and tossed away. Now “rotten to the core”, the fruits of the utopian English garden have become a poisonous symbol of man’s fall. Or perhaps they are nothing more ominous than evidence of a healthy diet in which their daily consumption contains the promise to keep the doctor away.
Essays
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Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen
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Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen
Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l’œil tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning ‘cheat the eye’, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l’œil art does not belong to a particular ism or medium but slips in and out of focus through the ages, depending on dominant regimes of representation.
Although the term was not coined until the early 1800s, the genre can be traced back to Greek and Roman times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes of a rivalry in ancient Greece between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, both accomplished in this particular art. Largely forgotten during the Middle Ages, the technique was given a new lease of life by the Italian Renaissance and the era’s advanced understanding of perspective, while painters of the Baroque era applied it to the then increasingly popular genre of still life. Artists of the Modern period, however, made limited use of trompe l’œil, as works no longer strived towards illusion or imitation but were made to investigate the grounds for art’s own existence. Nonetheless, a few