print
- Museum number
- 2015,6046.1.20
- Title
- Object: When I count, there are only you...but when I look, there is only a shadow
- Description
-
Print from a suite of 80 original photo-intaglio prints on Fabriano Tiepolo paper; artist's proof one from an edition of three and two artist's proofs.
- Production date
- 2013
- Dimensions
-
Height: 23 centimetres
-
Width: 30 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- Each individual print in the work relates to one of Francisco de Goya's prints from the Disasters of War series (1810-1820) with the figures removed. For the entire suite, see Registration Numbers 2015,6046.1-80. The digital element is 2015,6046.1.81.
The finished composition follows Goya's sequence of prints from left to right and top to bottom, excluding the last three prints that are in the Goya original. A video element accompanies the composition in which the figures removed from the prints re-appear in a projection.
The corresponding Goya prints can be seen in the British Museum collection (1975,1025.421.3-82).
To create the work, Goya’s original series, The Disasters of War, was scanned from a collection in Boston in 2010. It was a collaboration between the artist and the printmaking studio KA:V Editions (Tarlan Rafiee and Yashar Samimi Mofakham). The scanned images were digitally manipulated to take all the human and animal figures out. The digital files were printed on transparent films, in this case on Kodak transparency film to then produce a very fine digital print which included all the details and grey tones. The video work was done by Kambiz Safari in Iran. All the figures in Goya’s prints were animated and placed within three layers of video superimposed on each other. In the finished result, as the spotlight bounces from one print to another various parts of the animation briefly appear and disappear.
The title of the work alludes to TS Eliot’s The Wasteland:
‘…And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’
- Location
- Not on display
- Associated events
- Associated Event: Peninsular War (1808-1814)
- Associated titles
Associated Title: The Wasteland (poem by T.S. Eliot (1922))
- Acquisition date
- 2015
- Department
- Middle East
- Registration number
- 2015,6046.1.20