Gold

Gold extends Spriggs’s longstanding investigation of colour, monumentality and power, examining colour as an economic and political symbol. The sculptural pediment on the façade of the New York Stock Exchange provides a historical reference for its eleven inverted figures. At the centre, Mercury, the god of commerce, is reimagined as a woman, part of the work’s wider transformation of inherited identities and symbols of power. The figure connects financial power with the authority of classical mythology. Spriggs overturns this structure in an iconoclastic gesture, challenging its authority through the reversal of its own symbols.

The triangular composition recalls the global wealth pyramid, in which resources and influence become concentrated among a few. Pointing downwards, it also echoes the stock market symbol for falling value. The inverted figures resonate with pittura infamante, the historical practice of depicting condemned subjects upside down as a form of public disgrace. Here, that gesture is directed at a system of value.

Yellow paint and light give the figures the appearance of gold, evoking material wealth without precious metal. Their luminous, seemingly immaterial presence unsettles the solidity associated with monumental sculpture.

Read the story behind Gold →