Simon Fujiwara The Birth and Rebirth, and Rebirth of Who?, 2026
Acrylic, charcoal and pastel on canvas
200,5 x 300,5 cm (unframed)
227,3 x 327,3 x 8,1 cm (framed)
227,3 x 327,3 x 8,1 cm (framed)
Simon Fujiwara's large-scale The Birth and Rebirth, and Rebirth of Who? draws on Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–86). The work belongs to Fujiwara's series of works recreating iconic paintings by historically significant artists through the perspective of his cartoon figure Who the Bær. The composition reimagines Botticelli’s scene, but here the Venus figure isn't mythically rising from the ocean's cresting waves. Instead, she is being lifted from the sea by a metal hook.
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus has a complex history. Initially considered scandalous for its monumental nude female figure, today the image is among the most reproduced in Western art history. It is printed on tote bags, postcards, and phone cases and its original charge long dissolved into familiarity. In the context of Fujiwara's painting, Botticelli's motif, and especially the Venus figure, represent the exhaustion of the image in today's economy of attention. Endlessly reproduced, an image needs to perform. The exhaustion of Venus—hauled up by a hook and propped up by her attendants, a sodden figure dredged from the sea and held aloft to perform the role yet again—bespeaks this condition. The insistently staged Rebirth of the title acknowledges this history of reproduction — suggesting that the image, like identity itself, has never been singular or stable, but always already a copy.