Forged in COR-TEN steel and weighing two tonnes apiece, these monumental rings rest on the gallery floor like relics from a fallen myth. Originally designed to frame an elusive golden painting, the rings took on a life of their own — their presence outlasting the work they were meant to hold. Based on Minoan forms, they appear less like frames and more like the remains of some divine machinery — fallen or discarded, half-buried in time.
Paired with The Shield of Achilles Paintings, the rings stage a visual paradox: epic forms that speak of orbit and order, now oxidised into silence. Their rusting surface, engineered to weather evenly, becomes a kind of cosmic bruise — a record of heat, descent, and failure. They are, in the artist’s words, burned by their own ambition, like Icarus nearing the sun.
Whether interpreted as craters, shields, or broken halos, these rings summon a quiet drama: of creation abandoned, vision exhausted, dreams that came too close to their source. What began as a frame has become the work itself — not a vessel for an image, but the echo of an unreachable one.
Mark Alexander and the Prefiguration of the AI Age
Exhibited: A Blacker Gold , Haunch of Venison, Berlin.
