Lovas, Ilona: Innocenti 1-5. (2004)

As a series, the work Innocenti I-V. presents the social embeddedness of human existence, while the intense aura of the individual pictures reveals its deeply personal aspect. The starting point for the work was the photographs of the ceramic medallions found in the foundling hospital Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. Ilona Lovas cherished the photographs of the artwork, which capture the images of almost naked children wrapped in lint, for a long time and transformed them into her own work of art only when a maternity hospital in Afghanistan was bombed by mistake at the turn of the millennium. She topicalized the – direct and indirect – art historical references of the photographs with the use of a series of specific techniques. She enlarged the original photographs, reduced them to print quality, and cropped them. To the child trunks, she applied wafers that symbolize innocence, and finally wrapped these image-objects in ox-gut, which she often uses in her work on account of its multiple meaning. L.H.