News - Mona Lisa by Subodh Gupta



© Subodh Gupta. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Photo Stephan Wyckoff



Visitors to Piccadilly's Southwood Gardens will encounter Mona Lisa, though not as they know her. The most famous and enigmatic personality in the history of Western art has undergone a double makeover: Da Vinci's muse wears a moustache and goatee — courtesy of Marcel Duchamp's infamous 'L.H.O.O.Q.' of 1919 — and she has increased in scale, becoming a larger-than-life sized sculpture realised in black bronze. This transformation is the work of Indian artist Subodh Gupta and is both a homage, as well as the beginning of a dialogue, inserting Gupta into an imaginary conversation between the heavyweights of art history.