Daily Bread

2026, Oil on Italian Linen, 101.6 x 101.6cm

This work considers how value moves between the everyday and the revered. Drawing on the legacy of Mucha, whose career traversed from the cultural life and commercial success of Belle Époque Paris towards a later commitment to art as an act of service, the work places different ideas of artistic worth into conversation. Value emerges through reputation and cultural memory, but also through labour, generosity and purpose.

Within the broader series, the work returns to the proposition inherited from Cattelan: that an ordinary, perishable object can acquire extraordinary value through artistic designation. Here, that gesture enters the territory of an established artwork and is itself reconstructed through the painterly labour of trompe l’oeil. The question is no longer simply whether intervention adds or subtracts value, but how value moves between the original, the addition and the act of representation.

The title extends these questions through consumption and belief. Daily bread invokes necessity, ritual and spiritual sustenance, while the croissant carries associations of Parisian pleasure and cultivated desire. The ordinary and the luxurious occupy the same space. In the related sculpture The LastSupper, this trajectory is pushed further: the perishable is cast in bronze and granted the permanence once reserved for monuments, rulers and gods.