Self-Portrait with Hourglass.
One of a number of late works on the theme of Time, which the artist intended to explore in a Project of that name.
One of a number of late works on the theme of Time, which the artist intended to explore in a Project of that name.
Here, the artist is holding one of the influential texts which inspired his 1982 Project on the theme of Death and his essay on the contemporary "death industry" The Changing Pattern of Dying (1981). The picture relates to a number of late works on the theme of Time, and the book's title - In The Hour of Our Death - suggest this painting is a memento mori.
This painting was probably undertaken during the preliminary phase of what would eventually become the Gossip on The Barbican Project (1980).
Inscribed: An allegory of Folly”. Quenten Massys c. 1510-20.
An early watercolour sketch of this painting includes Lenkiewicz’s design notes. These explain the method of construction of the perspective and use of the Golden Section (a mathematical ratio said to give aesthetically pleasing and harmonious qualities to pictures and architecture) in the painting and show that Lenkiewicz had meant to place the three chairs in the picture in an unbroken line, a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923).
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