Le Bain turc (Tyrkneska baðhúsið)
Erró
- Year : 1979
- Height : 101 cm
- Width : 74 cm
- Category : Málverk
- Sub-category : Olíumálverk
In the 1970s Erró painted a number of series focused on space travel, using mainly pictures he acquired from NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States. Often he would pose heroic photographs of American astronauts made for the purposes of nationalistic propaganda, juxtaposed with sensuous depictions of naked women from art history. In this way, conquering space is comically associated with romantic conquest, which diminishes the heroic dimension of space exploration. In The Turkish Bath astronauts visit a harem in a painting by Ingres. On the one hand is rigid macho heroism, and on the other lust and feminine reverie. In the background we see astronauts proudly standing in the sky like demigods, towering over the voluptuous slave girls of the harem, odalisques who embrace each other in the foreground, taking up two-thirds of the visual field. From the smiling face of the astronaut in the top left corner a diagonal line leads down to the naked woman with raised arms at the bottom right. In this way there is a connection between the two visual fields in the painting, and the smile has more to do with the presence of the beautiful odalisques than with the conquest of space.
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