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 Eleanore Antin 
 Siegfried Anzinger 
 Sergia Avveduti 
 John Dugdale 
 Evergon 
 Andrea Fogli 
 Javier Gil 
 John Hilliard 
 Ian Knap 
 Jiri Kolar 
 Milan Kunc 
 Louise Lawler 
 Carlo Maria Mariani 
 Claudio Massini 
 Franco Mello 
 Yasumasa Morimura 
 Vik Muniz 
 Ugo Nespolo 
 Luigi Ontani 
 John O'Reilly 
 Laura Padgett 
 Vettor Pisani 
 Anne e Patrick Poirier 
 Arnulf Rainer 
 Roxy in the Box 
 Salvo 
 Stefano Scheda 
 Marco Silombria 
 Nancy Spero 
 Olga Tobreluts 
 Elmar Trenkwalder 
 Andy Warhol 
 Michael Ziegler 

 
 
   | Eleanore Antin    

Born in New York. She lives and works in San Diego.

 
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The Artist's Studio from "The Last Days of Pompeii", 2001

chromogenic print
117 x 147 cm
edition of 6
Courtesy Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milano
 
 
 

Pompeii, with its grand murals, flourishing gardens, excavated relics of everyday life and ash covered corpses has haunted western culture since its discovery over 300 years ago.
The image of the flourishing town living the good life on the brink of annihilation has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with the contemporary world, where the sunlit life turns out to have dark shadows in which cruelty, pain and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Its easy to see the connection to the affluent beach towns hugging the turbulent earth and slippery coast of my own Southern California. And part of the disturbing fascination is Rome itself, the great empire that owned and then lost the world. Every century has re-invented her in the light of its own desires, fears and lies.
Seeing it through a scrim of 19th century salon painting (Alma-Taddema, Lord Leighton, Puvis de Chavannes, Jacques-Louis David, Poussin) that I am recreating as a set of large color photographs of my own images, I am excavating a Pompeii of my own invention in which beautiful, affluent people live the good life, innocent of the disasters waiting just around the corner.

E.A.