Patricia Piccinini’s The Long Awaited (2008). Courtesy of Yvon Lambert New York, Paris.
Artist Patricia Piccinini Sculpts a Little Monster, Plus a Merman Thing
This vile, adorable creature (the naked guy, not the sleeping kid who is indeed part of the sculpture) is inspired by Albert Camus’s The Stranger in which a listless French man awakens to the absurdity of his existence. Here, Patricia Piccinini’s work, on view at Yvon Lambert for one more day, seems to be asking us whose existence is more preposterous: the wrinkled creature or the puppy-faced boy cuddling up to it? In fact, the more we look, the more we see a resemblance between these two lovable napping things. —Emma Pearse