7,000 handmade fried eggs by artist Christopher Chiappa can be seen at New York’s Kate Werble gallery. Chiappa’s egg obsession initially began in his studio with drawings and photographs, eventually materializing into a sculptural series. The forms are made through a carefully calibrated process of casting, pouring, sanding and painting plaster, refined into uncannily hyper-realistic sunny side up sculptures.
The symbolic function of the egg — traditionally embodying themes of perfection, purity and resurrection — is distorted by its fried nature. These droopy, cooked variations convey a more unfavorable position — broken, defunct, dead. Chiappa’s fried eggs operate squarely within the uncomfortable intersection of two symbolic legacies, mining the darkly humorous vein where perfection and failure meet,’ kate werble gallery describes of the exhibition. The title of his show, livestrong, confronts this duality, using a well-known cultural symbol as a metaphor for belief. This is familiar territory for the artist, whose visual lexicon frequently revisits figures from his suburban childhood – such as weber grills, basketballs, and volvos – to plumb the psychological depths of these gestalt images of mundane but wholesome american exceptionalism.’ Via: designboom
