Details
Andres Serrano (b. 1950)
Rape of the Sabine Women
each: signed, titled and consecutively numbered ‘Andres Serrano Rape of the Sabine Women 2/10 (part I) - (part III)’ (on the reverse)
cibachrome print face mounted to Plexiglas, in three parts
each: 27½ x 40in. (70 x 101.5cm.)
Executed in 1990, this work is number two from an edition of ten
Provenance
Stux Gallery, New York.
Pace MacGill Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York, 16 May 2002, lot 355.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Exhibited
Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, Andres Serrano, Works 1983-1993, 1994-1996 (another from the edition exhibited; illustrated in colour, p. 65). This exhibition later travelled to New York, The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Miami, Center for Fine Arts; Houston, Contemporary Art Museum and Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art.
Special notice
Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.
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Lot Essay

Rape of the Sabine Women, 1990 is a powerful triptych from Andres Serrano’s iconic ‘Immersions’ series. Serrano, a photographer who has never shied away from controversy, is most infamous for his 1987 ‘Immersion’ work Piss Christ: a close-up shot of a plastic Crucifixion submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine. With Rape of the Sabine Women, he takes up the same method. In a single photograph split over three vertical panels, a dime-store statue of the Roman mythological story – a subject beloved of Renaissance painters and sculptors – is given an otherworldly yellow glow. The image is monumental, atmospheric and formally beautiful. The muscular Roman soldier rears up powerfully in the women’s midst; twinkling golden bubbles cling to flowing drapery and anguished faces. If we were unaware of Serrano’s singular technique, the sculpture might appear to be cast in warm twilight or suspended in amber. A devout Catholic, Serrano has always claimed that Piss Christ is not blasphemous. While maintaining the work’s ambiguity, he has hinted at a critique of the crass commodification of the image of the Saviour. In Rape of the Sabine Women (as with another ‘Immersion’ work that employs a miniature copy of Rodin’s The Thinker) Serrano perhaps makes a comparable statement, foregrounding the reduction of great art to cheap souvenir: blown up to a grand scale, it becomes clear that the figures in this Rape of the Sabine Women are no feat of virtuoso marble sculpture but rather a plastic imitation, with a grainy surface and crudely moulded features. Serrano brings together conflicting registers of beauty and degradation, colliding the sacred and the profane in a complex and captivating photograph.

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