Belvedere, 1993

The work is made up of twenty-one elements placed close together so that they form a long rectangle made up of 3 x 7 units. The eighteenth-century youth situated at the centre – taken from the painting Les bulles de savon (ca. 1734) by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin – serves as the epicentre of a multitude of planets that gravitate in the deep blue background as though they were the soap bubbles blown by the young man. The celestial bodies gradually thin out towards the periphery, until they become "golden coins".
The work was originally conceived for the lobby of the Munich branch of a German banking institute at the time.1 The iconographic theme is included in a group of works with the same title, made between 1990 and 1996, whose common denominator is a figure located in either an elevated or a central position – in a "belvedere", as the title suggests – and correlated with one or more astral spheres, understood to be the symbolic model of incomparable perfection (cf. GPO-0665, GPO-0666, GPO-0667, GPO-0679, GPO-0698, GPO-0700, GPO-0714, GPO-0715, GPO-0776).

1 The work was commissioned from the artist on the occasion of the renovation, curated by Danilo Silvestrin, of Maffei bank (from 2004 Delbrück Bethmann Maffei AG) on Promenadeplatz 9 in Munich. Over the course of the following changes in the bank's ownership (including the acquisition by HypoVereinsBank – Member of UniCredit) the work was relocated elsewhere.