Studies for Caryatids

‘Studies for Caryatids’ is a series of seven free-standing stained glass artworks, popularly known as the ‘Miami Beach Boys’. The over-life-sized, semi-nude beach boys emerge from Ben-Day-style dots, painted and fired into the glass. They are based on photographs of nearly nude boys who modelled for Brian Clarke and the architect Zaha Hadid in Miami.

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‘Studies for Caryatids’ is a series of seven free-standing stained glass artworks, popularly known as the ‘Miami Beach Boys’. The over-life-sized, semi-nude beach boys emerge from Ben-Day-style dots, painted and fired into the glass. They are based on photographs of nearly nude boys who modelled for Brian Clarke and the architect Zaha Hadid in Miami.

In her 2001 essay ‘Weissnichtwo: Brian Clarke and the Global Sublime’, Carol Jacobi said:

‘The seven similar-but-different beach boys brilliantly up-date Duchamp’s Nine Malic Molds (1914–15), and his themes of modern, mechanised, commoditised love on endless, impotent repeat. Clarke’s multiplications of bodies, bathers and Ben-Day-style dots image a post-modern, screen-based desire for a digital age. The ‘caryatids’ evoke classical kouroi, Gothic saints, beauty pageant, boy band, frames of celluloid: their transposition of body/pillar image/sculpture condense being and artifice. They disturb expected distinctions between sacred/profane, figure/space, object/aperture. Power relations are also unsettled, the acquiescence signalled by the youth’s semi-nudity and animated, amiable gazes, are unnervingly contradicted by their superior size and stillness.’

These works were first exhibited at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York in Transillumination (2002), and for the first time in Europe at Christie's in 2011.

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