Istvan Horkay Museum Factory II. GOYA

Digital collages 128.9x103.9.cm 2001

Don Manuel Osorio Manrique De Zuniga,1788

Gift of David Harnischfeger and Committeee on Painting and Sculpture Funds

Istvan Horkay likes to layer figures and bits of text from different eras and nationalities. The bits and pieces are recognizable, however, at least with the help of the prompts in the titles of the works. The figure and setting of Figure 2.43 are made up of Goya's portrait of Don Osorio with Bronzino's portrait of Bia, the illegitimate daughter of Cosimo da Medici (who reappears in Joseph Cornell's famous "Medici Princess") layer over it, along with a Ralph Lauren label for Polo Chinos. In the background one can see an American flag with a protrait of George Washington. Horkay has a whole series with these American "logos" layered onto montaged images from classical European painting. The scene thus conjoins quite different eras, cultures and levels of culture in a quasi-space. The notion of appropriation comes to mind, but here the appropriation does not seem so much done to point out specific contradictions as to suggest that culture is the constant reappropriation of everything, currently culminating in pandemic Americanization