Description
Object description
image: A heavily abstracted piece with an isolated hanging form representing a dead body in the centre of the composition,
which hangs from a horizontal structure. This is surrounded by an amorphous mass of shapes, which appear to suggest a crowd of people
witnessing the scene.
Label
A Welsh-born painter and printmaker, Merlyn Evans was inspired by abstraction, Surrealism and Cubism. During the Second World War he served as an engineer in the South African Army in North Africa and Italy, having moved to Durban in 1938. Events in Italy inspired The Execution, originally an oil painting but shown here as a later and arguably more powerful etching and aquatint. It depicts the aftermath of the execution of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose corpse was suspended upside-down from the roof of a petrol station on Piazzale Loreto in Milan by Italian partisans. The abstracted arrow-head shape in the centre of the composition represents Mussolini's body, with the surrounding mass of shapes left, right and below suggestive of the crowd that gathered to throw stones at their former dictator. The harshness of the shapes and monochrome format graphically express the macabre witnessed event.
Label
A Welsh-born painter and printmaker, Merlyn Evans was inspired by abstraction, Surrealism and Cubism. During the
Second World War he served as an engineer in the South African Army in North Africa and Italy, having moved to Durban in 1938. Events in Italy inspired The Execution, originally an oil painting but shown here as a later and arguably more powerful etching and aquatint. It depicts the aftermath of the execution of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose corpse was suspended upside-down from the roof of a petrol station on Piazzale Loreto in Milan by Italian partisans. The abstracted arrow-head shape in the centre of the composition represents Mussolini's body, with the surrounding mass of shapes left, right and below suggestive of the crowd that gathered to throw stones at their former dictator. The harshness of the shapes and monochrome format graphically express the macabre witnessed event.