From our travels and just outside of the Nevada ghost town Rhyolite, is the Goldwell Open Air Museum. The museum was created by a group of Belgian artists and consists of seven outdoor sculptures dramatically using the Mojave Desert as a backdrop. The Last Supper, created by the late artist Charles Szukalski, is a piece that was due to last only a couple of years but withstood time and nature since 1984. Men from the local community were covered in linen and plaster to create the eerie forms, reminiscent of Da Vinci's last supper. Besides the Last Supper are many other interesting pieces of art in this isolated section of the desert located on a back road into Death Valley.

[Bob Harris]

The freestanding robes actually implement one of the traditions of Christian art, not to show the face of Jesus and the apostles, which are unrecorded, so as not to give a wrong image. This is implemented in some early stained glass which does not have facial imagery. I am not sur whether it is a medieval traditin or associated with the Reformed Churches. Somewhere I have pictures of an image in the cathedral in Utrecht which was hit by a tornado where the faces were all chiseled off by the reformed group after the reformation changes in the Netherlands. It woudl be intersting to find out about the artist who made them.

The main artist and group was Belgian, the late Albert Szukalski. Here is a link that may be helpful and thank you for the great info, very interesting.
Goldwell Open Air Museum & Artist Residency | Nevada Sculpture Park and Artist Residency

---

Last edited by Bob Harris; 01-28-2013 at 01:56 AM.

[tim60]

Bob, you challenged me to dig in the hard drive to find the picture from Utrecht. The notes in the plaque adjacent say: It is located in the burial chapel of Bishop Jan van Arkel of Utrecht (1342-1364 - note appointed bishop during the Black Death), died 1378. The fresco was made about 1500 and defaced (literally) in 1580 late in the reformation. The fresco depicted St Ann, St Mary and Jesus as a child - grandmother, mother and child.

[Bob Harris]

I didn't realize there was a religious connotation to not showing the faces, so the figures here do now make some sense, probably more associated with the Reformed Church I would think. Thanks for the add to the thread, I'll have to do some research to find out more. Bob

[tim60]

After the earlier correspondence I thought of another place I saw a similar thing. Most war memorials in Australia have realistic statues that look like they were modelled after some digger but the one in Melbourne has statues which have formless faces, so they abstract from particular to people in general, I think with the purpose of trying to represent all those memorialised by the structure rather than selecting someone. Possibly connected in an artistic sense to the idea of representationof individuals.