Medici Lion at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin is a statement of sustained sculptural tension and suspended meaning
The headline acts in Siobhán Hapaska’s recent exhibition are a big cat and a small dog – both in a somewhat beleaguered state. The former is a recreation of an antique marble monument: the show’s titular Medici Lion (all works 2023), composed of 3D-printed panels latched together and suspended above the floor by an elaborate system of straps. This pale, tethered, four-metre-long beast, a copy of a frequently copied historical sculpture (the first and most famous manifestations being the second-century Roman original and a later pendant, commissioned by Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1598), is hung as a spotlit trophy in the centre of the high, wide gallery. Hapaska’s lion is a meticulous reconstruction, but beneath the tautly held-together figure lie traces of destruction too: in place of the globe on which, in other iterations, the stately lion rests a strong front paw, symbolically proclaiming imperial majesty, Hapaska has arranged a tidy pile of marble fragments. These are, by implication, ruinous effects of excessive power: remnants, even, of a shattered world.
The other animal, near the entrance, underscores these apocalyptic intimations. Here, greeting gallery visitors is a sculptural portrayal (again mainly made in the milky polylactic acid of 3D printing) of a luckless pooch labelled Salvator Mundi – named in passing tribute to the damaged and disputed Leonardo da Vinci painting. Hapaska’s knee-high ‘saviour of the world’ (the Latin title’s English translation) looks an unlikely hero. Whereas in the painting, Christ cradles a crystal sphere – symbolising benevolent sovereignty over heaven and earth – the dog sits with a glass ball by its foot: a toy to be played with. Divinity is both suggested and travestied. Wrapped in bandages, its back legs hitched to a canine wheelchair, its small head hidden, absurdly and horribly, in an ill-fitting gasmask, this embattled mutt might be the last dog alive, less noble saviour than unexpected survivor. Its precarious existence, not unlike the literal predicament of the mocked-up Medici lion, hangs by a thread.
Accompanying information points, at times, to ways of contextualising these creaturely presentations. A soundtrack playing in the background while viewers contemplated the bulky physical presence and sleek, grey polymer surface of the lion is, for instance, identified as ambient noise from Westminster Abbey, recorded during the period of public mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, the variously clanging, shuffling and whispering sounds enriching the sensory complexity of the installation. But Hapaska’s sculptural entities feel more forceful and unpredictable when not harnessed to fixed historical realities. At their best – in drastic evocations of constrained and compromised organic nature, through controlled, sometimes savagely comic expressions of violence and physical pressure – her works provoke rather than pontificate.
Hapaska’s approach to sculpture, here, centres on almost sadomasochistic applications – and, as with little Salvator, sometimes sinister depictions – of material stress and physiological strain. Buckled within its taut web of seatbelt-style restraints, the Medici Lion is an assertively stabilised form, and yet its assembled pieces look equally liable to be pulled apart by the tethering. As with many other such instances throughout Hapaska’s work – the arrested motion of a motorised tumbleweed in Ecstatic (1999); the plump red fibreglass spheres squished to apparent bursting point between snakeskin-covered steel brackets in Snake and Apple (2018) – her strung-up, stretched-out take on the Medici Lion is a statement of sustained sculptural tension and suspended meaning. This much-replicated totem is, here, a singular presence and an ambiguous avatar: at once commanding and, as a symbol of lasting power, insistently insecure.
Medici Lion at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1 December 2023 – 10 March 2024
