Wool Tapestry, 114 x 220.5 in.
www.katemacgarry.com
Macuga is a Polish artist who is based in London, who made a large scale tapestry of Guernica for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp. Macuga depicts a woven photo-collage of Prince William speaking to a conglomeration of world leaders and dignitaries in front of the tapestry made for Nelson Rockefeller in 1954 by René and Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbac, after Picasso’s 1937 Guernica. The image looms in the background. Macuga uses the historical significance of the Guernica image—with its broader role as an archetypal symbol of war and destruction—in order to comment on the state of contemporary politics. Here she references the histories of both the original Guernica and the tapestry reproduction, which hung in the United Nations headquarters in New York. This tapestry was famously covered up when Colin Powell gave an address about the Iraq War in 2003.