In Vino Veritas

Before Nick became an artist he wanted to be an architect. He even went to school for it. But he changed his mind and became an artist instead.

We think you can really see that Nick studied to be an architect. Maybe the steel construction reminds you of the body of a ship. The yellow coral grows between the steel. Like it has been on the bottom of the sea. When you see all the objects in these sculpture, what kind of ship do you think this would have been? And where did it sink?

If you look closely at this work you probably see all the bottles and cans, but no wine. You might expect to see wine because of the title of this work. In Vino Veritas in Latin and it means ‘in wine lies the truth’.

The legs that are a part of this sculpture link it to wine. They kind of look like a bottle rack. In 1914 the French artist Marcel Duchamp made an artwork out of a bottle rack. Marcel made artworks that he called ‘readymades’. They became what he was know for. A readymade is an existing everyday object that Marcel made into an artwork simply by choosing it and presenting it as such. He did not change anything about the object, the fact that he chose it made it art.

Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Rack (1959). Replica of the 1914 original. Collection: Art Institute of Chicago.

Nick put himself into this artwork. Maybe you saw it already. There is a little plastic bust in hidden in this work. Can you discover it?