APKALLU (LOT 101)

2021

Graphite on paper, crayon on paper, mounted on diabond
 

In 2018 the auction house Christies sold an Assyrian relief of an Apkallu, a winged deity anointing a sacred tree. The relief was escavated at the Northwest Palace of Nimrud in the 19th century by the British Archeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard. The 3000 year old, approx 2×2 m large assyrian relief was sold for more than 30 million $, a record price. Acquired in the mid-19th century by the american missionary Dr. Henri Byron Haskell from Layard, it ended up at the Virginia Theological Seminary until it was sold at Christies. It is not publicly known who bought it and where it is now.
 

Over the a period of more than a year I have kept coming back to this relief and this has resulted in a number of smaller and larger works over the last few years, mostly in frottages build on the shapes of the figures in the relief. I have never seen the original relief and have had to rely on photographs.
The frottages are made from photocollages of elements of the relief, the slight relief of the paper is enough to give a sense of 3-dimensionality. But the frottages are always only depicted as slightly ghostly fragments of the gigantic relief.
 

Post am Rochus
October 2021 – March 2023