Sebi Schager (AT) – Marie-Thérèse Dreaming of 2019

The Art History Mesh-ups begin where most appropriation art stops: canonical paintings are reproduced on canvas, then physically reworked with stencils, spray paint, and 24k gold leaf — the intervention irreversible, the original and the contemporary sharing the same canvas. Some reworked canvases are rephotographed and produced as archival pigment prints, carrying the collision from studio to edition.

Marie-Thérèse Dreaming of 2019 — Picasso's Le Rêve (1932), Marie-Thérèse Walter asleep in an armchair, one of the most recognizable images in modern art, a painting that sold for $155 million in 2013. The Mesh-up adds two interventions: the original signature is crossed out and replaced with Sebi's own — the most direct gesture of appropriation possible — and the dream is updated. She's no longer dreaming in 1932; she's dreaming of 2019, the last year before the world tipped. Made in 2020, the title creates a double nostalgia: Picasso's for youth, ours for a pre-pandemic moment that — over six years later — still hasn't returned. The roaring twenties came back as promised, just not the kind anyone ordered. Duchamp signed a urinal in 1917 and called it art; here the crossed-out signature goes further — it doesn't claim the object, it claims the dream.

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About the artist

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