Wedding by Zoey Frank

Wedding (2018) was inspired by Théodore Géricault’s celebrated French Romantic painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819), in which the last survivors of a shipwreck wave desperately to a ship on the horizon. 

Frank has always been struck by the scale and ambition of Géricault’s painting and by the pyramid of closely packed human figures that he depicts surging towards the horizon. Here, she recasts the composition as the moment in a Jewish wedding reception where the bride and groom are lifted into the air.

Although Wedding started with one art historical reference, formal considerations became more important as Frank continued to work on the painting. She looked to early Renaissance painters like Giotto and Piero della Francesca for their handling of light, form, and space. The wedding takes place in a light-filled, compressed space, in which patterns both cover the walls and seem to emerge from them.