LIU BOLIN 2012
In his performances Liu Bolin chooses public, serial, emblematic environments which he integrates into using camouflage, making himself invisible. In the many projects that interpret his social, political and cultural commitment, his body declares its belonging to that specific place.
He has a special interest in Italy and its artistic heritage. Pauline Borghese Bonaparte as the Venus Victrix, the legendary work by Antonio Canova, is one of the icons of the Galleria Borghese. Connected to the history of the family and the collection, at a certain moment in the history of Italy and Europe, Pauline was the wife of Camillo Borghese and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte. Antonio Canova, the supreme Neoclassical sculptor, portrays her in the nude, haughty yet seductive, reminiscent of the ancient funerary tradition in classical antiquity and the Venus of sixteenth-century Venetian painting. The sculptor’s amazing technique, which gives a tactile plausibility to the marble surfaces, makes it an eternal masterpiece.
The sculpture acquires a fundamental symbolic value and the room that houses it becomes an emblematic place for Rome and Italian art. Bolin, thanks to his usual, highly accurate body painting, blends with the statue and room until becoming part of it.
A new photographic self-portrait of Liu Bolin, Hiding in Italy, invisible in the Galleria Borghese.