Adad Hannah’s Guernica Redux By Alma Mikulinsky, Ph.D.
Guernica Redux is the latest chapter in Adad Hannah’s creative dialogue with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. While for some artists, Picasso’s 1937 icon stands tall as a powerful symbol of antiwar sentiment, one that cannot be matched in its expressive cry against war violence, for Hannah it also presents an opportunity for genuine creativity.
As seen by his various Guernica projects, the artist overcame this anxiety of influence and instead has engaged in a fruitful process of rethinking and remaking Picasso’s masterpiece. Since 2017, when Adad created Backyard Guernica – which exists as both a moving tableau vivant as well as a series of staged photographs – he extracted the original from the annals of art history and brought it into his backyard, so to speak, making it his own by creatively engaging with its legacy. Hannah returned to the theme in 2021, when creating Saskatoon Guernica, in a process he described as “an attempt to expand and experiment with pulling Guernica apart in different ways.” The result was a three-dimensional assemblage, made from various found objects integrated into a cohesive whole.
Guernica Redux is yet another phase in this ongoing dialogue; Hannah is now working towards Guernica as a life-sized bronze work, taking apart Picasso’s compositional components and recreating a new whole. This process is captured in a series of smaller sculptures, maquettes of the final sculptural work, presented for the first time at Art Toronto.
In the maquettes, Hannah hand-modelled Picasso’s forms, shapes and overall composition in clay. The artist selected key elements from the original composition, then gradually abstracted and re-built them into distinct sculptural groups. Figures from Picasso’s painting – the shocked bull or the grieving mother, screaming her pain to the void – lose their figurative expressiveness and gain instead material vibrancy through their pockmarked texture.
Hannah, however, went beyond the original when adding various fragments, such as cast hands, miniature pots and pans, car parts, and other objects into the mix. He also included additional materials such as rope, netting, foam, and leather into the cast, resulting in a mélange of forms and textures. Guernica Redux is therefore a strange assemblage of objects that approaches Guernica yet avoids simply replicating it.
By so readily exposing his process, Hannah also returns to a common motif in his work, which he describes as showing the backstage, the props, of revealing how the work is made. The sculptures therefore testify to the creative process, a journey which takes us further away from Picasso’s work and deeper into Hannah’s mind.
These works exist in an in-between space which points to the past – art history’s tradition, the artist’s own practice and the story of the pieces’ making – as well as to the future, to a full-scale bronze work and to potential encounters between viewers and the objects themselves. Guernica Redux’s power lies in the work’s ability to grasp this suspended time in material form and invite viewers to interact with it.