Untitled - 2016

On a Monday in winter of 1911, The Louvre museum was closed as usual and workers and photographers were working. Vincenzo who used to work there as a carpenter entered, took the Mona Lisa out of its frame and slowly left the building. It was the Louvre, an empty frame and a fingerprint of a thumb. Police and detectives' search was in vain. Even when they suspected Vincenzo Peruggia, his fingerprints did not match the fingerprints on the frame's glass!

Six thousands copy of Mona Lisa were distributed across France asking anyone with any related information or hint to report to the police. It was only after that incident that Mona Lisa gained hundred time more fame. Two years away from the suitable condition of maintenance, and in the Vincenzo's house, it stayed intact.
it was discovered on way back to its country in a meeting in a hotel room in Florence and sent back to France. What the police concluded was that the fingerprint was of the left hand but they only had the right fingerprints of suspects at the time. Vincenzo spent few years in jail, and Mona Lisa stayed on the wall of the Louvre and earned a worldly fame; an incident in which the Vincenzo Peruggia's role can not be dismissed!

This presented work consists of six thousand left fingerprints of the artist for a story to be told about the biggest art theft of the 20th century. In this work, like my other works in recent years, the minimum possible of material have been used. As if, the audience is in the position of a police or an investigator and looking for a halo of a much seen work and amidst fingerprints that are supposed to be removed from the frame's glass.

Nasser Teymourpour- Winter 2016- London