Simon Fujiwara A Dramatically Enlarged Set of Golden Guillotine Earrings Depicting the Severed Heads of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, 2019

The point of departure for Simon Fujiwara's new sculpture is a pair of earrings in the shape of two guillotines with the heads of Queen Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI hanging from them; the earrings are believed to be made and sold around the time of the French Revolution. Fujiwara has digitally reproduced and enlarged the earrings to create a monumental sculpture printed in 3D and hand-gilded in 23K gold.

For the artist, "The work connects deeply to my ongoing study of human-product-object relations, and the commodification of ‘everything’ that is reaching a peak today. They are a gruesome but glorious reminder of the ways human capitalize and reinvent almost any kind of event but they are also a celebration of the human ingenuity to convert everything into some form of object or celebration, in this case, the perversity of celebrating the fall of a kingdom that was plagued by excess and overspending by making gold earrings."