Nelson Hernández
The Abduction, 2026
Oil on wood
61 x 46 cm
Series: Fever Dreams
Signed & Dated on the back
Further images
The Abduction (2026) begins with a classical sculpture housed in a London museum, captured through photogrammetry and digitally reconstructed. The intertwined figures evoke the iconography of the mythological abduction, while...
The Abduction (2026) begins with a classical sculpture housed in a London museum, captured through photogrammetry and digitally reconstructed. The intertwined figures evoke the iconography of the mythological abduction, while intersecting with toys, Asian sculptures, and fragments of London's urban fabric. Bathed in a greenish, almost swamp-like light, the image dissolves into soft focus, destabilizing the legibility of the bodies and flattening the hierarchy between its disparate elements.
The title operates on multiple levels. It refers not only to the explicit abduction depicted in the mythological scene, but also to the quieter forms of appropriation that underpin the museum as an institution: the displacement of cultural objects, the assimilation of foreign canons, and the historical erasure embedded in colonial collecting practices. Oscillating between the revered and the ordinary, the work reflects the condition of a globalized visual culture, where references from different histories and geographies coexist on the same plane, detached from their original contexts.
The title operates on multiple levels. It refers not only to the explicit abduction depicted in the mythological scene, but also to the quieter forms of appropriation that underpin the museum as an institution: the displacement of cultural objects, the assimilation of foreign canons, and the historical erasure embedded in colonial collecting practices. Oscillating between the revered and the ordinary, the work reflects the condition of a globalized visual culture, where references from different histories and geographies coexist on the same plane, detached from their original contexts.
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