Saturday
2008
C-Print
49 x 64 cm (19 5/16 x 25 3/16 in.)
Saturday, a photograph from the Pinault Collection by artist Adel Abdessemed, captures a moment in the daily life of a mother and her three children. Under a bright sun, a family walks dog skeletons in the street. They are Julie, the artist's wife, and his daughters near his New York studio on a Saturday afternoon. The surrealist, metaphorical dogs symbolize the thoughts of death that relentlessly haunt the living, even in the most intimate moments.
In the mid-2000s, Abdessemed performed a series of macabre dances in the streets of Western cities. Obsessed by the death and violence he fled in the early 1990s in his native Algeria, he draws on an iconographic universe that echoes the metaphysical anxieties of human beings. He says, "I turn horror into symphonies.”
Saturday was first exhibited by the Pinault Collection during the "Qui a peur des artistes?" (“Who’s Afraid of Artists?”) show at the Palais des Arts in Dinard in 2009.
In the mid-2000s, Abdessemed performed a series of macabre dances in the streets of Western cities. Obsessed by the death and violence he fled in the early 1990s in his native Algeria, he draws on an iconographic universe that echoes the metaphysical anxieties of human beings. He says, "I turn horror into symphonies.”
Saturday was first exhibited by the Pinault Collection during the "Qui a peur des artistes?" (“Who’s Afraid of Artists?”) show at the Palais des Arts in Dinard in 2009.
Exhibitions
© Adel Abdessemed / Adagp, Paris.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
