Simon Fujiwara Study for a Guernica for Who? (Who's in Despair?), 2025
117,8 x 87,9 x 6,1 cm (framed)
The work draws on a scene from Simon Fujiwara’s Who vs Who vs Who (A Picture of a Massacre) which itself is based on Pablo Picasso's famous Massacre in Korea from 1951.
While Picasso's work paid homage to the Francisco Goya's The Third of May Execution (1814) and The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868) by Edouard Manet, Fujiwara adds another layer by including a miniature version of Picasso's own anti-war masterpiece Guernica (1937) held up by one of the women in the group. It is however not Picasso's original, but Fujiwara's own reworking of the ionic work that he represents. It is this detail on which Study for a Guernica for Who? (Who's in Despair?) focuses, depicting the head and torso of a distressed person holding up a "who-ified" interpretation of Guernica.