27. 27AR WIM DELVOYE (born 1965) Nautilus 2013 Laser-cut stainless steel Unique piece Lasergesneden roestvrij staal Uniek stuk Laser-cut stainless steel Unique piece 100 x 90 x 45 cm Provenance / Herkomst Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner Private collection / privécollectie, France A certificate from the artist will be given to the buyer Gothic has been called many things: the epitome of grotesque, the essence of spirituality, the embodiment of 12th and 13th century liturgy, the abandonment of the classical style, or just the elegant solution of a structural problem, but the French style subsequent to the Romanesque, also got revived by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye who, starting 2001, began to call Gothic his own, giving a new contemporary impulse to this style, describing it as an exemplum of a European springtime. Prominent within Delvoye's Gothic body of works are his life-size construction machines adorned in Gothic decoration made out of laser-cut steel. In these works, he marries small and large-scale pieces to create monuments of everyday objects like trucks, bulldozers and cement mixers - Gothic is employed as the raw material, the substance from which these sculptures are made and elaborated upon. With its mathematical symmetry and skeletal tracery, Delvoye's Nautilus expands this series but also combines the architectural and mathematical, the divine and the secular, the feminine and the masculine. Deriving its composite parts from Gothic Northern European cathedrals, the work evokes the representation of divine harmony and cosmological order of the golden ratio and conveys both lightness and density. The work fuses the swirling form of a Nautilus shell, with one of Delvoye's fluidly twisting Gothic Towers (like those he exhibited at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2012 or the Musée Rodin, Paris, 2010). During the Renaissance and Gothic period, Nautilus shells were popular display items and are thus very fitting as a Delvoye reference, playing around with the motif of the Wünderkammer and questioning art as a commodity.