According to the myth, Medusa was a beautiful woman, who guarded with her life the temple of the goddess Athena, and after being raped by Poseidon is punished by Zeus’ daughter who responsible for the abuse makes her a monster thus losing her privileges and her attractive mane, which turns her hair into a nest of snakes. After the rape she becomes pregnant and is sentenced to exile and in her sleep was beheaded by Perseus.
But in the sculpture of The Argentine Lucas Garbati, it is Medusa who holds Perseus’s head, resigning the tragedy.
This sculpture, as its meaning, has been raging in New York since it was placed last week in front of manhattan court courts, where, among other cases, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison on March 11 for rape and sexual assault offences. The work became a symbol for the MeToo movement and its creator does not escape the amazement, seeing that his work became an emblem for women. On the CNN Aire program tomorrow, conducted by Guillermo Panizza, the artist, born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, noted that the Argentine Medusa “It is a dream, something that was unimaginable”.
He also said: “I receive messages from women who identified with sculpture as a cathartic possibility. Some of them suffered gender-based violence,” Garbati said from New York.
“It’s impressive what happened to the sculpture,” he said. And he emphasized the fact that Medusa, with perseus’s head, more than two meters high and part of the Art in the Parks program, is located “in a square surrounded by buildings where justice is delivered”. It’s really symbolic.
“I made it in 2008 in polyester resin. He was in my studio for ten years until in 2018 I posted his image on Facebook and it went viral. I received a call to exhibit the original sculpture in a sample about the relevance of the myths. Afterwards, a patron said he was willing to finance bronze production if we found him a place. The Medusa was selected, I made a bronze copy in Philadelphia and now we install it here,” Garbati reviewed.
