Frieze Masters 2025

Kneel is made from a marble known as Damascus Rose, distinctive for its flesh-like hue, this particular piece hails from Syria. For Cross, this provenance immediately evoked the biblical story of the Road to Damascus and the miracle of the enlightenment of St Paul who was blinded and had his vision restored.

Crystal ‘nests’ are in fissures in the stone, these add a particularly beautiful geological essence to the work, whilst the rich, visceral hue and its polished finish evoke the interior of the body.  The pose of this pair of feet is based on studies made by Albrecht Dürer for the feet of St Paul as depicted in the Heller Altarpiece (1509). In Cross’s sculpture, the spatial ambiguity and the unexpected view of the naked soles makes the human form emerging from the hefty piece of marble feel excruciatingly vulnerable. 

A single foot carved in lustrous black marble from Tanginika rests on top of a severed classical capital. Both are fragments from different territories, united in incongruous harmony by the artist.  The time-worn capital, once part of an Irish church, was spotted by Dorothy Cross in a salvage yard and remained in her studio for many years. At a later date, the black marble caught the artist’s eye at Studio Carlo Nicoli, Carrara where she often works.

The smooth, polished foot, replicated from the artist’s own, has been carefully extracted from the block using traditional carving methods. Presented as a fragment, and placed on an architectural ruin, the piece recalls the broken statuary of past civilisations which we are so familiar with from museums and the ancient sites. 

Between 1992 and 1995 Dorothy Cross made a well-known series of sculptural works using cow udders. In these pieces the skins and mammary glands of dairy cows are crossed with an array of everyday items: a rugby ball, high-heel shoes, a pillow. 

Cross was inspired by an object she discovered in a small folk museum in Norway: a sieve made from the udder of a cow, an object both utilitarian and surreal. For Cross, the teats in isolation were both tragic and powerful. When dried they hardened and presented a phallic contrast to the vulnerable milk-giving teat. Here the taxidermized udder becomes the seat of a traditional Irish Súgán chair. The work arouses strong, strange, deep memories of contact, smell, and taste as it confronts us with the beast in our human selves. The cowhide also calls to mind Meret Oppenheim’s intriguing fur teacup Objet (1936), melding the animal and the domestic.