Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.
Ever fancied cohabiting with an effigy of Kate Moss? Should you have £25,000 going spare, then Opera Gallery in London has you covered. The gallery is exhibiting a hyperreal sculpture by Lithuanian artist Edgar Askelovic, apparently depicting the hard-partying supermodel ‘as a combination of Venus, icon and mannequin’.
MILF (2017), Edgar Askelovic
Tastefully entitled MILF, the armless sculpture weighs in at 80kg and has been created from ‘top quality’ platinum silicone with eyes created from UV resistant polyurethane resin. ‘Kate Moss could have been a mannequin, but instead she has became a goddess in the fashion industry’, says Askelovic.
Numerous artists have depicted Moss – most of them men – and she may be the most prolific celebrity sitter/subject of our times. She has been contorted into a yoga position by Marc Quinn, portrayed as a faceless arrangement of shapes by Gary Hume, photographed and sculpted into an Amazon pose by Allen Jones and painted while pregnant by Lucian Freud – who used the opportunity to perform an amateur tattoo job on her back.
Even Banksy has had a go, producing a series of prints based on Warhol’s screenprints of Marilyn Monroe. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones once commented, ‘Kate Moss is the muse who has never found the right artist’.
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