Piers Secunda acquisitions
Congratulations to Piers Secunda, whose work has recently been acquired by the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum. A portfolio of five etchings, created using charcoal gathered from the Mosul Museum, has entered the British Museum’s collection, while his four-part relief painting ISIS Damage Painting (Nineveh) has been acquired by the Imperial War Museum.
ISIS Damage Painting (Nineveh)
2019.
28 x 210 x 2cm
The damage marks in this work were moulded in early 2018 by Piers Secunda (from surfaces of Assyrian sculptures destroyed by ISIS in 2014) inside the Mosul Cultural Museum in Iraq, a few months after the liberation of Mosul. The moulded gouges on the surface of the panels are “chatter” marks, made as the pneumatic drill blade bounced on the surface of an Assyrian sculpture, as the ISIS fighters attempted to break the sculptures into small pieces. The four panel work “ISIS Damage Painting (Nineveh)” serves as a warning from history to future generations, that the eggshell thin walls of Museums, the repositories of our collective human history, are only as strong as our willingness to protect what is inside.
The moulding that was carried out to produce this work, was done with the permission of the Iraqi Culture Minister Fryad Rwandzi, using a moulding technique developed by Tessa Jackson, an ex Tate Gallery sculpture conservator. Piers was introduced to Mr Rwandzi at the Autumn of 2017 at a UNESCO General Meeting in Paris. Mr Rwandzi invited Piers to Baghdad and offered to assist him in his work about the destruction of culture by ISIS in Iraq, which he started to produce in 2015. The original Assyrian relief is from the Palace of Sennacherib, inside the ancient site of Nineveh, in Mosul.
Portfolio of 5 prints:
5 Etchings portraying the interior of the ISIS desecrated Mosul Musuem in 2018. Printed with ink produced from charcoal gathered inside the Mosul Museum in early 2018 by Piers
Piers Secunda was born in London in 1976 and studied painting at Chelsea College of Art in London. Since the late nineties Piers has developed a studio practice using paint in a sculptural manner, rejecting the limitations imposed by the canvas.
Piers’ work has developed into a research heavy practice, which examines some of the most significant subjects of our time, such as energy and technology history and the deliberate destruction of culture.
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