Mannequin - 150 000 gouttes de sang

Ughetto’s work questions the relationship between the living and the ephemeral, the non-living and the almost eternal.

At the age of 22, Henri Ughetto fell gravely ill, and remained in a coma for two months. When he awoke, he had to relearn everything. From that point on, the world was “like an addition”. He became interested in accumulation and started to create his first rot-proof mannequins in 1965.
To the mannequins, he attached eggs, vegetables, fruit and all kinds of plastic items, often with sexual connotations. From 1970, he covered them in drops of blood, then in red paint, which he considered and defined as “a ritual [acting] like a metronome”.