Koen Vanmechelen. Seduction

Huge horned iguanas, a red tiger crouching in the middle of the Niobe Room, new versions of the Medusa, whose head teems with hybrid figures bearing bizarre beaks and sharp teeth: a legion of fantastical creatures now populates the Uffizi Galleries in Seduzione, an exhibition by Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen.
The exhibition includes 30 artworks presented among the museum's masterpieces. Vanmechelen's works vaunt a strong visual and conceptual impact. Born in Sint-Truiden, Belgium, the artist's practice embraces a range of disciplines, bridging the realms of art, science and community engagement. A painter, sculptor, performer and philosopher, his interests range from anthropology to bioethics, the protection of human rights to bio-genetics and concepts relating to hybridization among animal and plant species and contamination within culture and nature as well as in formal and conceptual expression. The works in the exhibition, which were created especially for the Uffizi, focus on the primordial, archetypal and antithetical concepts that have always nourished the human imagination: life-death, human-divine, earthly-spiritual, and natural-artificial. Presented in dialogue with the Uffizi's collection, the art creates an evocative and disorienting journey centred on the notion of seduction.
Along the Uffizi's second floor corridors, among the classical statuary, the white Statuario marble sculptures of Vanmechelen's Temptation series depict emperors, philosophers, warriors, heroes and divinities. Atop each figure is a cracked glass egg from which hybrid creatures spring forth, representing the freeing of the mind and its imagination. Another intriguing juxtaposition includes Bambino con Gallo, a plaster cast by the nineteenth-century Florentine artist Adriano Cecioni (normally on display at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti, but moved to the Uffizi for this occasion), with Vanmechelen's Cosmopolitan Fossil. Inspired by Cecioni, Vanmechelen transforms the innocent bird featured in the historic work into an enormous iguana characterized by disturbing mutations, barely restrained by the child who holds it in his hands. Cosmopolitan Fossil references the futile effort by humanity to control the unstoppable forces of nature and is intended to encourage a more loving and healing embrace of the wider natural ecosystem. It's a particularly poignant piece in the context of our ongoing pandemic