Angela Bulloch Pythagoras' Shadow in a Bean Field, 2023

The wall painting references the rhomboid shapes of Bulloch's ‘stack’ sculptures, more specifically the work Pythagoras in a Bean Field. The latex-based wall painting appears as a deconstructed shadow, a silhouette of the sculpture, displacing its spatial form into a two-dimensional plane of a wall. The wall painting then constitutes an alternative, a graphic representation of the vertically assembled rhomboid shapes that make up the three-dimensional sculpture Pythagoras in a Bean Field.

Wall paintings are an integral part of Angela Bulloch's practice. While they relate to her earlier cartoon-based wall drawings from the early 1990s and the graphic representations of her Rules Series works, the relationship to sculptural works was formalized in 2000 when she transferred onto the wall a two-dimensional version of the Pixel Boxes.

Angela Bulloch’s more recent Wall Paintings echo and adapt the rhomboid shapes of the geometric sculptures in a two-dimensional plane. The artist juxtaposed contemporary technology, used for the conception and realization of the sculptural work, with the history of wall painting, evoking the ancient costume of humans drawing on walls.

The title refers to an anecdote about the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras who, when chased by mortal enemies, refused to cross a fava bean field and thus was killed.