Eine große Skulptur hängt kopfüber von der Decke und trägt eine Uniform in Rot, Weiß und Schwarz. Die Figur hält ein goldenes Tablett, während Schokolade darauf tropft und auf ein weißes Podest darunter fällt.

Pope.L

A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On, 2007

Dimensions287.7 x 83.8 x 71.1 cm
Year of acquisition2024
Inventory numberUAB 1349
On viewOn view
Copyright© Pope.L,  Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Photo: Dirk Tacke, Museum Brandhorst, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich

More about the artwork

From the 1970s until his death in 2023, Pope.L worked with various media, including performance, public Interventions, texts, film, and sculpture. In his works, he often employed ordinary, quotidian objects and absurd gestures to confront the discomforts of American society and to question categories such as race, gender, and class. In "A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On," the head of a found plastic female pirate sculpture is replaced by a gilded plaster bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. The central Black activist of the American civil rights movement had already served multiple times as a humorous projection surface in Pope.L's works. Also characteristic is the use of organic and edible substances such as mayonnaise or peanut butter, with their changing states and associations that are both physical and social. Here, it is chocolate syrup that flows through the hollow, assembled, upside-down "monument," continuously dripping onto the museum floor.