Laocoon, 2007

Liane Lang (b. 1973)

RA Collection: Art

Laocoon is one of the Casts series of photographs made by Liane Lang whilst in her final year at the Royal Academy Schools. In a statement about the work, Lang describes the series as an attempt to consider the traditional plaster cast from a contemporary point of view. Using re-configurations, which draw out the cast's qualities of gesture and sensuality, the artist aims to animate them away from their academic confines.

In Casts, Lang animated various plaster casts from the RA Collection with seemingly living figures which are, in fact, latex casts. Here, she focused on part of one of the most famous groups in the plaster cast collection, the Laocoon, an historic copy of the original in the Vatican Museums, Rome. The image shows limbs from the RA's Laocoon copy as well as latex arms made by the artist and a 'found' arm of a crash test dummy. Lang states that the 'resulting confusion of limbs plays with animacy in figurative sculpture and tries to retell the composition and narrative of the ancient art work through a modern medium'.

Quotes from an unpublished interview with the artist 2017.