Visual & Material Analysis

This sculpture presents an inflatable dolphin mounted horizontally on a black wooden stool, elevating a mass-produced leisure object into the register of sculpture. The seams, valve, printed safety warnings, and retail graphics are intentionally left visible. Nothing is disguised. The dolphin is not transformed materially—it is recontextualized.

Key formal tensions:

Soft vs. rigid: inflatable vinyl against a utilitarian stool

Play vs. display: pool toy vs. pedestal logic

Horizontal body vs. vertical art-viewing posture

Cute iconography vs. institutional presentation

The stool functions as a surrogate pedestal, but a deliberately inadequate one—too domestic, too casual—undermining the authority of classical display.

Conceptual Relevance

This work sits convincingly within post-readymade, commodity critique, and late-Pop / post-Internet sculpture traditions.

Relevant art-historical touchstones (without imitation):

Duchamp – readymade logic, but softened and consumerized

Warhol – mass imagery, but stripped of branding heroism

Jeff Koons – inflatable aesthetics, minus polish and spectacle

Haim Steinbach – object-as-display syntax

Josh Kline / Mika Rottenberg – late-capitalist absurdity