Stealing Shadows, Michelangelo

Ana Prvački finds our daily world an unparalleled stage for artistic interventions. She resists our obsession with material things, and she applies a playful touch to her critical thinking on how we allow objects to dominate our lives. Prvački has focused on different social norms regarding personal space; on the tangible influence of ephemeral music; and has invented all kinds of contraptions that celebrate the human capacity for the invention of useless things.

Sculpture Milwaukee presents Prvački’s Stealing Shadow: Michelangelo’s David. This world-renowned monument, created between 1501-1504 by Italian artist, poet, and architect Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, comes from an Old Testament story about the shepherd boy David who defeats Goliath of the Philistines with a simple sling and rock. While Michelangelo elevates a commoner to the status of the victor, David’s face is also wrinkled with concern. By presenting David’s shadow on the street, Prvački brings to us a monument of comfort and faith in the way we face the challenges of our own daily lives. Prvački’s provocative appropriation also pokes at the long shadow this monument plays in establishing standards of public art. Artists adapt and change with every generation, and Prvački’s ephemeral “monument” points to the new genres of public art that exist in our world.

Prvački, born in Pančevo, former Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1976, lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MA at the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore, in 2005; her Master Arquitecturas Genéticas, El Nuevo Proyecto Cibernético y Ecologico, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona, in 2001; and her BFA at the Pratt Institute, New York, in 1991.