Simon Fujiwara Who's a Goes Around and Around? (Mad Media), 2022
223,6 x 283,6 x 6,1 cm (framed)
Who's a Goes Around and Around? (Mad Media) is from Simon Fujiwara's series of works recreating iconic art works by famous, historically significant artists through the perspective of his cartoon figure Who the Bær.
Executed in acrylic, charcoal and pastel on canvas, Simon Fujiwara’s Who's a Goes Around and Around? (Mad Media) draws on the work of modernist painter Henri Matisse: Dance, 1910. It is one of the best-known works by the French artist. It depicts five dancing figures in red ochre set against a simplified green and blue background. Commissioned by Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, the painting is currently in the collection of The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. The preliminary version of Dance is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Fujiwara’s work turns the dancer figures into Whos by adding their archetypical pink tongues that protrude from their mouths and spew yellow liquid all around. Each Who dancer holds a smartphone, hinting to the constant connectedness to social media and networks characteristic of contemporary life. While Matisse’s dancers are rather neutral in their facial expressions, the multiple Whos appear stressed, anxious or otherwise strained. Their bodies are somewhat contorted, and one of the Whos appears to have fallen while dancing.