DECONSTRUCTING LAOCOÖN
2022

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In 2022, standing before the Laocoön group in the Uffizi in Florence, Barbara Hennig Marques was struck by the raw force the marble still radiates after more than two thousand years — the coiled tension between suffering and monumentality that has unsettled viewers since antiquity. Deconstructing Laocoön is her attempt to carry that force onto paper, not through weight, but through fragility.

Working in pencil across three sheets of differing paper, each with its own grain and resistance, Hennig Marques approaches the ancient sculptural group three times, in three distinct registers. Her characteristically loose, searching line does not seek to reproduce the statue's anatomy, but to trace the energy moving through it: the coiling, the strain, the instant before collapse. What results is not a copy of the marble, but its deconstruction — the same intensity, translated into something delicate, almost provisional, held together by nothing more than graphite on paper.

 

Three works, pencil on paper, A4, 2022.