Yet another example where a nymph transforms into a tree (see also Phyllis and Demophoön, 1905). Here Daphne is fleeing from Apollo’s advances because she decided to remain a virgin. To help her, she is turned into a laurel tree by her father, the river-god Peneus who is represented by the river in the background. Apollo continued to admire the laurel tree and used his eternal youth to prevent the leaves from withering.
The work is clearly inspired by the marble statue of Bernini from Galleria Borghese in Rome. Waterhouse never managed to sell this painting and that is probably also because the art critics reviewed it in a very negative way. They criticized in particular the feeble representation of Apollo.
it will never not be funny to imagine a 16 old emotional, awkward and acne covered boy aka apollo as lester calling himself the father of a bunch of kids that are OLDER than him and giving them tearly proud dad smooches
William Bankier, the Scottish Strongman was born on December 10, 1870 in Banff, the eldest of four sons of William Bankier , a hand loom weaver, and his wife Mary Ann.
As a child William became fascinated by the idea of being a circus performer, by the age of 15, he had twice run away from home, eventually joining a road show and finding a friend and mentor of sorts in its star attraction, a strongman with a drinking problem. As that performer’s absences piled up, Bankier saw an opportunity to showcase his own strength. Other circus jobs soon awaited, among them “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show in Wyoming.
As part of his act, Bankier would harness-lift an elephant. He could also jump over the back of a chair, frontward or backward, while holding a 56-pound weight in each hand. Another celebrated routine, the “Tomb of Hercules,” saw the strongman support a piano with a six-person orchestra and a dancer. Bankier would always end the performance by offering cash to the audience member who could carry a sack weighing 475 pounds off the stage. Inevitably, the strongman kept his money. He could also hold a man aloft with one hand, while juggling plates with the other”
After retiring, “Apollo” as he became known, became a wrestling promoter, teaming up with fellow bodybuilder Monte Saldo to form an academy for wrestlers, boxers and jiu-jitsu competitors. His famous book on muscle-building, Ideal Physical Culture: And the Truth About the Strong Man, was published in 1900. In it, Bankier challenged German rival Eugen Sandow to a series of competitions in wrestling, running, jumping and weightlifting. Sandow.
Shogo Chikaishi is an unhappy young man. He has no idea who his birth father was, and his mother supported them by inviting a string of horny men to her bed. She had little love to spare for her child, who often got in the way of getting her customers to part with their cash. Sometimes he even glimpsed moments of his mother and her clients making the…
Born in Germany in 1961, Katharina Grosse has endeavoured since the late 1990s to make her very personal painting practice a powerful contributory tool to transform the world. Her often spectacular expansive works explore the potentialities of painting, well beyond the boundaries of a frame or canvas, embracing floors, walls, ceilings, objects or entire landscapes to create multidimensional pictorial sites. All her installations immerse visitors in a sea of colour that challenges and disrupts their sensory and physical perceptions. In 2013, Grosse began broadening her artistic scope by printing photographs on fabrics, like polyester and silk. In a dynamic dialogue with the architecture, her wall-sized prints – as seen at China’s chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018) or, most recently, at Finland’s HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2021) – display an imagery related to her painting practice, such as photos of her paintings, studio views or her paint-steeped hands.
From May this year, her work will be shown in Fugues in Color exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; and this autumn, an original work commissioned by the Fondation in dialogue with Frank Gehry’s architecture will be installed on-site. Specifically created for Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, in a black setting largely covering the floor and the wall, Apollo, Apollo features a compositive image of the artist’s hands printed on a metallic mesh fabric, depicting a moment where the boundaries between the artist’s body and the coloured material blur in the act of creating. In the words of Katharina Grosse: “The image is chosen from a series of photographs showing situations or actions, connected to my painting practice in some way or another. […] It oscillates between surface, texture, image and object, order and disorder, destruction and creation, tension and release, forced and freeflowing movement.“
In the Venetian context and imaginative world – Fortuny fabrics, Terrazzo mosaics, omnipresent water and reflections – the metallic fluidity and hued intensity of Apollo, Apollo (a title that works as a mantra with polysemic connotations and condenses and combines mythology with the conquest of space) take on special resonance here. The surface reflects visitors’ movements and contributes to the quintessentially Venetian mirror effect. Apollo, Apollo blends the transparent with the opaque, letting light filter through, creating a gateway to a dreamlike world in which visitors question their own perceptions of reality and illusion.
Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Since the end of the 1990s, she has been renewing the pictorial medium by intervening directly on the architecture of the institutions that welcome her, making the spray gun her favourite tool. More recently she has developed her works further by painting on expansive drapes or printing photographic images on very large sheets of fabric in a mise en abîme of her practice.
