The callback

2026, Soft Sculpture (Silk, Foam, Rubber), 160 x 160cm

This work extends the proposition that the banal can acquire cultural value through artistic intervention. The absurdity of a banana elevated through designation is pushed into another register: first through the inherited prestige of porcelain, then through a further act of translation that draws on the language of the Pop movement and its long fascination with the everyday.

The work recalls Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, whose transformations of ordinary objects helped collapse distinctions between commodity, subject and artwork. Here, that lineage intersects with Cattelan’s banana, creating a loop between two moments in art history when the commonplace was reassigned value through context and authorship.

Within the broader series, value again moves between materials, references and established names. Each transformation alters how value is understood and where worth is thought to reside. The title borrows from the language of comedy: an earlier proposition returns in altered form, calling back to previous moments in art history when the ordinary was transformed, reclassified and absorbed into the canon through context, authorship and collective belief.