In the inventory of the Prado in Madrid, Velázquez’s Las Meninas used to be called, rather, a “family portrait,” and this is how Gabriele Di Matteo titled his exhibition: “Quadro di Famiglia.” Five large replicas of the celebrated painting were exhibited on the walls, each the same size as the original but fragmented into sixteen square modules that, together, make up the famous scene—the presentation of the Infanta Margarita during a sitting for a portrait. More precisely, four paintings repeated this scene, while the fifth showed the modules in scattered order, a sort of re-creation in

At the Fifty-Third Venice Biennale, Andrei Molodkin, a Russian-born artist living in Paris, made a splash with his installation Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), 2009. Displayed in the Russian pavilion, it revealed the artist’s signature approach—encasing a hollow sculptural object in an acrylic block and filling it up with crude oil. For this installation he made two miniature replicas of the Louvre’s Nike of Samothrace, adding pumps that pushed crude oil and blood through them. Red and black images of the sculpture were projected full-size onto a wall using small video cameras.