Fred Wilson

Donated by Fred Wilson and Pace Gallery

New York, The Pace Gallery, Fred Wilson, Venice Suite: Sala Longhi and Related Works, March - April 2012

Bat (2009) is a Murano glass wall sculpture that relates to the body of work Wilson began to explore more than a decade ago in Venice, including the massive black Murano chandelier that hung in the rotunda of the American pavilion in 2003, hauntingly obscuring rather than illuminating the space, and seen in his recent Sala Longhi (2011), an installation of twenty-seven paintings in the same black Murano glass, which reference Pietro Longhi’s eighteenth-century painting cycle. In 2009, Wilson worked with Berengo Studios in Venice to create a process for layering black Murano mirrors together, their backs painted black rather than silver to create ghostly, emotionally charged objects of contemplation. Here, the ornate Baroque “mirror” suggests the shape of a spread-winged bat, in which the spectator is but dimly reflected.