Images(4)

After the Mona Lisa 2

Artist Devorah Sperber American, born 1961

Date2005

Medium5,184 spools of thread provided by Coats & Clark, stainless steel hanging apparatus, aluminum ball chain, acrylic sphere, and metal stand

DimensionsImage (spools of thread): 85 x 87 in. (215.9 x 221 cm)

ClassificationsMixed Media

Credit LineGift of the North Carolina Museum of Art Contemporaries

Object number2006.13

On View

Not on view

Label Text
Devorah Sperber’s multimedia works incorporate everyday materials—thousands of spools of thread, pipe cleaners, colored tacks—to reinvent famous works of art. She is interested in exploring the reproduction of images in the digital era, the links between art and technology, and visual perception—how the eye and brain make sense of the visual world. She starts by scanning a reproduction of a painting to create a color-charted map, which she remakes in three dimensions using small objects to mimic the pixels of digital images.

In After the Mona Lisa 2, Sperber takes a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s painting—probably the most recognizable and reproduced image in the history of art—and transforms it by inverting and enlarging it to an immense proportion (the original sixteenth-century painting is only thirty by twenty-one inches). Viewing the work through the sphere mimics peripheral vision, turning the image right side up and shrinking it to a recognizable size.
[L. Dougherty, 2010]ProvenanceCreated United States, 2005; collection of the artist; sold to NCMA, 2006.Published ReferencesMarilyn Kushner, "Ways of Seeing," in 26th Ljubljana Print Biennale (exhibition catalogue) (2005).

Update: New York Academy of Sciences Magazine (March/April 2006), detail (color) cover.

"Contemporaries Take a Fresh Look at Mona Lisa," Preview: The Magazine of the North Carolina Museum of Art (September/October 2006), discussed and illus. (color details) 20.

Nina de Gramont, "After the Mona Lisa" in “You Are the River: Literature Inspired by the North Carolina Museum of Art,” edited by Helena Feder (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2021), illus (color) 180.Exhibition HistoryLjubljana, Slovenia, "26th Ljubljana Print Biennale," June 23-October 2, 2005, catalogue.

Savannah, GA, Telfair Museum of Art's Jepson Center for the Arts, "Fast Forward: Three Decades of Contemporary Art from the North Carolina Museum of Art," January 23-April 27, 2008.

Wilmington, NC, Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum, "Bearden to Ruscha: Contemporary Art from the North Carolina Museum of Art," May 22, 2008-May 17, 2009. Object Rights Statement

The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) makes images of its collection available online to support research and scholarship and to inform and educate the public. Certain works of art, as well as the photographs of those works of art, may be protected by copyright, trademark, or related interests not owned by the NCMA. The responsibility for ascertaining whether any such rights exist and for obtaining all other necessary permissions remains with the applicant. To request images and/or permissions from the NCMA, please complete our online request form.