Joep van Lieshout’s Wellness Skull of 2007 is an oversized plastic skull with integrated spa facilities including a sauna and a bathtub. Lieshout uses this ironic memento mori to comment on the physical fitness craze of today’s society, which is but a surrogate for any spiritual experience beyond all physical and material concerns. The artist sees the skull metaphorically as a vessel of the human spirit. What Lieshout addresses in Wellness Skull is the interplay of supernatural divine forces and earthly power, which he ironizes once again by assigning the symbol a very practical function: once the sauna heats up, white smoke or vapor comes rising out of the skull’s openings.

Wellness Skull is one of a series of works that deal with systems of repression or restriction and analyze economic principles. Based on his reading of Machiavelli and his preoccupation with vanitas symbols that keep recurring in the works of the Dutch Old Masters, Joep van Lieshout has made Wellness Skull an ironic summary of what he thinks of our present-day society.

Text: Bettina Busse