Back in 1999 Hiroshi Sugimoto made a very large set of images depicting The Last Supper, which were photographs of wax models from a wax museum based on Di Vinci’s famous painting. (He did an entire series of portraits of wax models called Portraits and this work is from that series). This particular piece was in storage in a basement in New York when hurricane Sandy hit. The piece was severely damaged by the waters in the flooded basement. Instead of destroying the work Sugimoto has deemed it an act of God and is selling as such with a new title: The Last Supper: Acts of God now showing at the Fraenkel Gallery.
When god is your partner in making an artwork how can you go wrong in turning what is actually a destroyed work into an even more collectable piece? I will let you be the judge….
“I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished Last Supper to completion. Leonardo completed his Last Supper over five hundred years ago, and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through a half-millennium’s worth of stresses in so short a time”.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Last Supper: Acts of God, 1999/2012. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
The Last Supper: Acts of God (detail), 1999/2012 © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery,
Hiroshi Sugimoto and The Last Supper. All photos and quotes via the Fraenkel Gallery.
