French contemporary artist Gilles Barbier made this sculpture: "Where Spandex Goes to Die: Superhero Nursing home Sculpture." I love the wit and humour used as it sees superheroes who have passed their shelf life sit in their own nursing home. (Obviously they have to have their own one as a normal old OAPs home would simply just not do).
Although humour being a key part of this piece there is also something very sad and melancholy about their old and decrepit form. It shows superheroes who have given their all to save the world (obviously these things do happen in real life), but have been left misshapen and useless, just former shadows of their younger and much more glorious selves.
A lady called Kim Levin wrote about this with much more elegance than I did here back in 2003, she said:"...Gilles Barbier's equally ambivalent and hilariously deadpan take on the American hero. In this French artist's life-size tableau, Nursing Home, our beloved comic-book superheroes have been aged since the year of their tabloid births, as if fictional archetypes of invincibility were subject to mortality, too. The Incredible Hulk, flabby and in tatters, vegetates in a wheelchair. Catwoman dozes. Superman leans on a walker. Mr. Fantastic dangles his overstretched limbs. And Captain America lies comatose on a gurney, attended by a decrepit Wonder Woman. The TV plays, but the sound is pure golden oldies from the Platters. This piece isn't subtle. But it's deserved: An artist from "Old Europe" has succeeded in suggesting (tempus fugit, sic transit gloria mundi, gotcha!) that others may have a more sophisticated understanding of superpowerdom than we have ourselves."
I think it's damn bloody beautiful and genius, and has a slight hint of Darren Aronofsky's film The Wrestler. (which I did a little cheeky blog about here).
For more of Gilles Barier's work you can look here.
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