Gernika in sand by Lee Mingwei

Gallery 3.5, Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA)
From 3 May - 6 July 2008

Visitors are invited to view Gernika in sand by New York-based artist Lee Mingwei who re-created Picasso's famous work over a ten-day period.

Picasso's Guernica (in Basque Gernika) depicts the massacre of Basque civilians by the Spanish military in the early twentieth century, and is considered one of the most powerfully political art works of that century. Such massacres, of course, are not limited to a single time and place.

The project, developed by artist Lee Mingwei, uses Guernica as a reference point as well as a point of departure.

Midway through its display on Monday 9 June, the artist returns to alter the work, destroying it over the period of a day by sweeping the sand using a bamboo broom to create a new work that is characterised by its sweeping abstract and gestural forms.

Rather than focusing on the cruelty of the massacre Guernica depicts, Lee Mingwei points to impermanence as characteristic of existence and larger cycles of destruction and creation.


Photograph: Lee Mingwei's "Gernika in sand"  by Anita Kan
Mixed media interactive installation, Chicago Cultural Center, 2007 
Courtesy: Lee Studio